Homemade Sausage Making

Hello all,
I have been smoking meat and making simple sausages for years. This year I brined a pork collar to make coppa for the first time. I know optimal conditions for it to work but could not achieve them as I do not have any special equipment.
Basically after brining I washed the coppa with dry white wine, dusted it with fennel and pepper tied it and hung it in my kitchen. The conditions in my kitchen are 15-17 C temperature(it gets higher when I am cooking but not much) and humidity is between 50 and 60 %. There is some ventilation but I haven't got a fan. I put the coppa on the scales today and and can see that it has lost 20% of it's weight already after 2 weeks. It is quite hard on the outside and has a patch of white mould that I have not seen before. My question to you, more experienced folk is can I save it? Can I put it in the fridge? Thanks in advance!
Frankie

Hi Frankie and welcome to the forum. Your coppa was not made properly but it might be OK if it got a whole lot of salt in it. To begin with, brining adds water to meat, so a dry cure would have been more appropriate. Going over 15C is also not recommended. Your humidity is also on the low side. Did you use any curing salt? Putting it in the fridge might slow down the bacteria growth, but whether the end product will be safe to eat, I would not attempt to answer that question without seeing it and smelling it. What ever the result, what you will have is a piece of dried meat as opposed to a properly cured and ripened product where salt brings down the level of water activity to a safe level, and proteolysis and lipolysis change the proteins and fat in the meat.

Thanks for the speedy reply. I actually dry cured it and used some of the pink salt.

If you don't have the right conditions to dry meat, you might want to explore drying in Umai bags. Since you would be drying in refrigerator temp, the flavour of an Umai dried product will lack some of the complex flavours developed in a product matured in warmer and more humid conditions. But if you season it well the meat in the Umai bag will dry slowly and evenly and will be quite tasty.

Thank you redzed, much appreciated!