Hi everyone, I’m new to the forum but not sausage making. I’ve been at it since 1989 when my parents brought me a chorizo making kit from Spain. I have read several of Fidel Toldra and Marianski brothers books and make mostly dry cured sausages. I just moved to the US from Europe and am getting my ...

Very nice. In my attempts at head cheese I have used commercial gelatin, flavored with stock. The flavor was never quite right. Is there a way to make a decent head cheese without a whole head? Maybe just hocks, tongue and skin, which are things I can more readily buy?

I think a fatter and larger cut would be less less stringy. Thanks. Maybe the size is due to my butcher skills or lack thereof. What you see is the largest intact piece I have been able to get out of a whole bone-in butt. I'll try to source some heritage pork instead of this supermarket-quality but...

Some pics. Color has faded over the weeks, but texture is the same. This was aged to 40% weight loss, about 7 weeks. It’s a small coppa, ending at 752g.

Is the recipe for half-sours different? How do you arrest the fermentation?

I will post a pic if I have any coppa left—I’m out of town and don’t recall if I ate the last of it. Bob, that’s interesting to know that commercial coppa is often cooked. Even products imported from Italy? Seems like cheating. My Hobart 512 slices paper-thin, so that’s not an issue. It is possible ...

I trim the butt to leave as much of what the Italians would refer to as the coppa as possible, as shown in the many videos available. Sometimes I trim more and sometimes less, depending on how intact the butt itself is. I have had the best success with bone in-butt, as boning it myself seems to make...

Since getting started in this hobby maybe six months ago I have been tweaking my drying chamber and have cured a number of coppe and bresaole, trying different combinations of spices, weight loss percentages, mold vs no mold, etc. For the coppe I have been using commodity pork from various supermark...

. . . Are you using an override temperature controller or cooling with the built in one? Any rust issues on the inside? Yes, I use a temperature controller with my little Beverage Air. The interior is white, and it looks refurbished (painted), probably by the local Coca-Cola bottler whose stickers ...

My drying chamber is based on a small older-model Beverage Air glass door cooler. The original fan was way too powerful, causing too much air circulation, so I replaced it with a computer fan rated at 60 CFM, which is probably still a little high. As originally wired, the fan runs continuously, not ...

redzed wrote: ↑

Sat Jun 19, 2021 18:40

Those of you who have not already done so, check out Bactoferm Meat Manual Vol. 2. Reat the section on trouble shooting, or better yet, read the whole thing. https://hjemmeriet.com/da/ChrHansen/Bro ... 20(UK).pdf

Great information. Thank you.

I have mold starting to grow on the bresaola I inoculated and put in the drying chamber five days ago, but although I re-inoculated the uncooperative coppa at the same time, nothing is growing on the coppa yet. I don't have a good way of logging the temperature, but I suspect the chamber has been av...

Try increasing the chamber temp to 58*F. Mold grow is very slow at 52*F....it will eventually grow to cover the product, but the increased temp. will help get it started. I need to experiment with moving the temperature probe around. It's at the top of the chamber, and the temperature controller's ...

Thanks, Ed and Stefan. The first effort didn't develop visible mold after 7 days, but then I had to terminate the experiment because I was leaving town for a couple of weeks and couldn't tend to my drying chamber's humidifier refills, so I vacuum-sealed it and put it in the regular fridge, knowing t...

These are my very first efforts at dry curing. I cured my first few coppe without mold to establish a baseline of what to expect. The results were fine. Now I am trying the same recipes except that I want to see what effect mold might have on flavor and texture. I prepared the mold by adding somethi...