Soap-water cant hurt. You don't need to spray the chamber with mold. If you are using the Mold 600, apply that to the casings by either soaking them prior to stuffing or spraying them afterwards. As long as your temperature and humidity controls are working, you should be good to go.

I Googled PSE and now I know what it is. Learn something new every day! And happy to report that I do not have PSE meat. The lighter color of my pork is based on the cut of meat. It is not due to poor carcass quality.

I will post some photos of the Salame Calabrese as we go forward.

Thanks, good info!

The pork is from center cut chops. Good sale and very lean looking. I dont know what PSE means, but I hope I dont have it!

Hi Redzed: I am trying my hand at your Salame Calabrese recipe. I had a couple of questions to ask if you don't mind. I was able to obtain pork back fat from a local amish farmer's market. I cut it up, but then took a look at your photo above. Mine has striations of meat mixed with the fat. See the ...

The heating pad in the freezer is working well. On at 32 deg., off at 50 deg. It takes several cooling cycles to get back to 32 deg in the freezer so the heating pad is not running too much. This might do it. We will see how it works in the winter time.

Thanks guys, I think John is spot on with his water balance calculations. I initially thought about cutting the floor between the freezer and fridge so that the ambient conditions within the freezer would match the curing chamber and allow the coils to melt between cooling cycles. This would not cha...

That sounds right with the thermostat setting. I was hoping that maybe the freezer section would get above 32F during the non-run time so the coils would defrost. The heating pad does not go on at this time of year. I might try hooking it (or some heat tape) to the second temp. controller and puttin...

Hey John, I am going to adjust the fridge thermostat to see if that helps. I had duct open wide but had thermostat set to "coldest". Maybe lowering that will do it. I have a second temp probe I just put in freezer. It is 16 deg. F. In there. - right now I am maintaining 55 Deg. F. Ambient has been 7...

So, I have a top freezer/bottom refrigerator that is fairly new. I use an Inkbird temp controller to turn on the refrigerator to cool the bottom section and to turn on a heating pad to warm the bottom section. I have an Inkbird humidity controller to turn on an ultrasonic humidifier to raise and a p...

And here is the final product.

Thanks for the reply! I followed your advise and used the full meat weight to calculate the salt. We made 24 lbs., plenty for the freezer. I fermented for 18 hours, cold smoked for 7 hours and then sous vide to 152 IT. The fibrous casings split in the water bath and I lost a bit of fat. The test pat...

Bob K, I am going to try your tweaked version of the recipe early next week since I want to use the culture to get the tang. All of the ingredient percentages are based on the pork fraction, not just the salt percentage where you have that written, since the bacon is already cured...correct? Have yo...

he only issue with it is the tank is only 7 litres and I would have to continuously refill it. Any suggestion on getting around that? You could also use something like this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0077RAUTA/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1 It is a float controlled valve that ...

Wow! Thanks for the speedy replies. The tandem peppercorn response is relieving. It did not occur to me that I would need to adjust the dextrose. In The Art of Making Fermented Sausage, the ideal is between .1 and .3 % sugar for slow fermented sausage. I didn't think this would change just because I...

These spots appeared halfway through the 48 hour fermentation period of Stanley Marianski's Soppresetta recipe. I used T-SPX even though no culture is called for in his recipe. Fermented at 68 F and 80-90% humidity. Mold 600 was applied midway and is now starting to grow. Spots are below the casing ...