Advice on patience please!

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maloflora
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Advice on patience please!

Post by maloflora » Mon Jan 18, 2021 19:55

Hi all,

First post - please forgive my beginner status! I've just recently got into dry curing and love it. I've made bacon, and salami so far using so much of the good advice on these and other boards. They seem to have worked well. But I've run into uncertainty on my latest.

I recently made some big chorizo: three 800-900g sausages in fibrous cases of around 65-74mm. So pretty thick, but very easy to manage for a beginner like me. All went smoothly - fermentation with T-SPX, PH testing down to around 5.1 and so on - but they're very slow to dry in my curing fridge. After nine weeks, they are down to 73% original weight, but are only losing about 1-2% a week. Is that normal? Should I expect salami this fat to take 3-4 months? I'm happy to be patient but it's hard! Do I need to wait until 60% or can I try earlier?

I've got the fridge set up at 10-11C and 70% humidity. I'm pretty sure there's no case hardening - things feel firm and squidgy, not hard, and I started things off much more humid - around 80% for the first few weeks. Bactoferm 600 means there's lots of powdery white mold and no others that I can see. I've attached a picture so you can see where I am after 10 weeks or so.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

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redzed
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Re: Advice on patience please!

Post by redzed » Mon Jan 18, 2021 22:03

Hi maloflora, and welcome to the forum!
65-75mm casings are mid sized, and with the parameters you described, a couple of months usually should be enough to lower the weight by about 35%. Most of the weight loss occurs in the first 2-3 weeks and then it slows down considerably. One reason that might be causing the slow drying might be a high percentage of fat, since fat contains almost no water. Another reason might be that you used frozen meat and a lot of water was relesed from it during thawing. And are you calculating the weight loss from before or after fermentation? How much sugar (dextrose, sucrose) and paprika did you add to the chorizo? What was your starting pH and what meats did you use?
maloflora
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Re: Advice on patience please!

Post by maloflora » Tue Jan 19, 2021 18:01

Thanks so much for the welcome and for responding!

Here's the recipe I used in %s:
Pork 80%
Fat 20%
Salt 2.50%
Cure no. 2 0.25%
Hot paprika 0.75%
Sweet paprika 1.75%
Garlic 1.00%
Oregano 0.20%
Dextrose 0.20%

The pork was shoulder, which of course has a high fat percentage to start with. I part-froze everything to make it easier to grind but only for about 45 minutes or so, with half the fat ground and half diced. The meat started unfrozen. I'm calculating the weight loss after fermentation. I'm not entirely sure on the PH for this batch as I only got a proper tester for the salami a couple of weeks later, but it fermented for about three days at 20C and 90%+ humidity.

One thing that may affected things is that I made some fennel salami about two weeks later and put those in the curing chamber, so humidity may have been over 80% for longer than normal.
maloflora
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Re: Advice on patience please!

Post by maloflora » Sat Feb 06, 2021 14:45

Bit of an update. I waited until 70% and then decided to cut into one of the chorizo. Here's what it looked like - smelled great.

I can't see a lot of case hardening?

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