Humidity control! (or lack thereof)

Oh the humidity!  There have been plenty of blog articles about curing chambers; they vary from mini-fridges to full-size household refrigerators to commercial coolers and beyond.  What's necessary to create a good curing chamber is temperature control, humidity control, and airflow.

My own curing chamber is a mid-size fridge, more akin to a mini than a full-size, with a single chamber that includes the freezer compartment.  The problem with this kind of fridge is that it is not self-defrosting.  Those refrigerators have the advantage of venting humid air, whereas in mine, that humidity stays put, and is increased by the presence of meat that has moisture trying to escape.

There are ways to counter this high humidity.  The most common is using a tray of salt slurry (salt-saturated water, or water-soaked salt).  The theory here is that NaCl regulates relative humidity at around 70% at around 55 degrees Fahrenheit.  I stress the word THEORY here because I have found this not to be so easily done as said.  More on that later...

Another method, obviously, is to use a dehumidifier.  The only problem here for me is that dehumidifiers cost money - not a lot, but humidity controllers (a.k.a. hygrostats) also cost money.  I was hoping to use the hygrostat sibling of my temperature controller, which I could buy for $28.99. Unfortunately, that unit only controls a humidifier, not a dehumidifier. I would have to get something like this $89.99 unit, which controls both.

Not wanting to dish out this much money (for the cost of a dehumidifier plus the controller, I could probably get a self-defrosting fridge from craigslist, plus the cheaper controller and a cheap humidifier), I decided to go the salt slurry route...

I started out with a ~2 quart plastic container full of rock salt and water.  Without the two cuts of lonzino in the fridge, this got my humidity to about 85%.  Added the meat, and it quickly shot up to 90%.  I already had a salvaged computer fan that I planned to add to the setup for air circulation, so I cut a hole in the side of the fridge, mounted the fan, with another hole in the opposite side for a louver vent.  This didn't seem to have much effect on the humidity.  I added more salt - about a pound of rock salt on a plastic plate, no water; I also dumped the old container of salt and filled it back up with no water.  This seemed to be helping...

In the meantime, I noticed some mold spots forming on the meat.  At first I thought this was the "good" mold - chalky white.  But it didn't take long to realize that it was the bad, fuzzy stuff.  I pulled the meat out of the fridge, brushed it clean with white vinegar, and reapplied the olive oil/pepper coating.  Luckily we were having a cool spell (cool in Seattle/August is ~75F), so I was able to hang the meat in the basement, which was running around 60-65F with 70% RH - nearly perfect.

Where I stand now: I added a third container of salt and set the temp controller a little higher - around 58F.  Without the meat (still hanging from the basement ceiling, thankfully no return of the mold), it's sitting at around 80% RH.  The next step is to rig up a drainage system for the condensation and melt dripping from the freezer department.  I think it will help to decrease the amount of standing water that can re-evaporate into the air.  Hopefully this gets me down to my 70% target.  If not, a dehumidifier is in the future... to be continued.

First cuts into the curing chamber!

The lonzini bothers - trussed, oiled and peppered

The time finally came to pull my lonzini from the ziplocs in the fridge, clean 'em up, tie 'em up, and hang 'em!  After enough time in the salt, the meat firms up - the curing process removes a lot of liquid from the proteins, taking away the pliancy of raw meat.  Since I had not gone to the trouble of draining the extracted liquids they were still retaining some, so hadn't lost any weight yet (actually, each had gained a few grams).  That is the purpose of the drying fridge.

Here they hang for two or three weeks

After pulling the first cut from the ziploc, I rinsed it with water and set it on the baking rack to dry a little bit.  Rinse and repeat with the second piece of meat, and then truss them both up like a roast.  There are lots of videos on YouTube that show how to do this; it's really simple.  First, tie the string around the meat lengthwise, binding the loin on four sides; next, start at one end and cinch up loops around the meat every inch or so.  You put the loose end of the string under the loop so it tightens under itself, then cinch it tight before starting the next loop.  Finally, tie the string the the other end, leaving a loose, long loop to hang it by.

Once the meat was tied, I liberally rubbed each cut down with olive oil, then dusted with black pepper.  The oil serves to keep the outside from drying too quickly, while the pepper fights off pests and (I think) bacteria.

I also put my recipe/weight cards in little ziploc snack bags and stapled the bags to the string.  This gives me a way to identify each piece of meat and ready access to the target weight.  After a week or so, I'll pull them out every couple of days and weigh them until they hit their target of 30% weight loss.  Then they're ready to eat!

Temperature control

My temperature controller arrived from Amazon.  I got this $18 unit, which measures in celcius and requires some wiring work to get it up and running:

Elitech Temperature Controller STC-1000

I have seen several builds online, so copied a couple of them (Misplaced Cunuck's and TomSD's).  With a few more bucks' worth of stuff from Lowe's (and an old computer power cord I had laying around) I set up a box.

The reason I used the 4-gang box is because I might eventually add the similar Humidity Controller to the same box.  For now, those two slots will stay empty.

I wired this up and set it on top of the fridge, in a hurry because I was leaving for London the next day and wanted to get the thing running before I left.  I wanted to put the lonzini in there as soon as I got back...

 

Future curing chamber!

This is Pacienza, my new curing fridge/fermentarium. She will be hosting many many salted meats, fermenting beers (and possibly wines) in the future! I ordered a Temperature Controller(and possibly a Humidity Controllersoon). The carboy fit test was a success! Not bad for $25 on craigslist, huh?

 

Lonzino (regular and SPICY!)

With the wife and kids out of town for a couple of days, I set about making my first lonzino.  I had been doing some research and had some ideas in mind.  I was trying to decide between traditional and spicy.  My friend (and new salumi investor/co-conspirator) Mia, who would be paying for the ingredients in exchange for half of the finished product, preferred spicy.  I did too, but wanted to be able to give some to my kids, so I decided to cut the loin in half and make both recipes.  

Although the recipes (below) are different, the process was the same for both.  After cutting the loin in half, I set about mixing the curing ingredients.  I set the empty bowl on the kitchen scale, then added each ingredient, measuring by weight as a percentage of the weight of the meat.  Since each cut of meat you cure will be a unique size, you always want to measure by percentage of weight.

Next, I used a mini food processor (in lieu of a spice grinder, which would be better) to combine, and in the case of the red peppers, grind, the ingredients.  Funny side note: When mixing dry ingredients, don’t get too close when taking the lid off – the spicy blend really burned my sinuses!

Once all the ingredients were blended, I rubbed them into the meat, making sure all surface areas were covered, and that the cure got into all the little nooks and crannies.  Another note here: You can remove the fat and silverskin from the meat before curing it, but I didn’t.  I would have removed the silverskin, but it was under the fat; I wanted to keep the fat because it takes on great flavor and texture when cured.  I’m planning on slicing this lonzino very thinly, so the silverskin should not be an issue.  If I ever cut it thickly (like for a soup), I’ll trim the fat and silverskin.

Finally, I placed each cut of meat into a gallon-sized ziploc bag, making sure to include any loose curing ingredients that didn’t stick.  The bags then go into the regular refrigerator with some weight on top.  I put them in a 9x13 baking pan, with another 9x13 on top, and put a bag of onions in the top pan.  This helps squeeze out the water and press the salt into the meat.

The meat will stay in the fridge for a while (18 days in this case because I’ll be out of town, but usually I would give it 10-14 days), after which I’ll take it out, clean it, truss it, and then hang it to dry.

One final note: I used a small amount of Cure #1 in these recipes, but I don’t think it’s necessary.  Cure #2 is actually recommended for air-dried salumi and salami, but I didn’t have any.  I don’t know if I’ll use either for whole muscles in the future.  Maybe if I start making sausage…

Ingredients (some smaller amounts are approximate because my scale is not super-accurate)

Lonzino

Pork loin (Whole Foods): 1387g

Kosher salt: 42g (3%)

Cure #1: 4g (0.3% - ~1/2 tsp)

Brown sugar: 14g (1% - ~3 tsp)

Black pepper: 4g (0.3% - ~1 tsp)

Garlic powder: 4g (0.3% - ~1 tsp)

SPICY! Lonzino

Pork loin (Whole Foods): 1262g

Kosher salt: 38g (3%)

Cure #1: 4g (0.3% - ~1/2 tsp)

Red pepper flakes: 10g (~1% - 5 tsp)

Smoked paprika: 2g (~0.2% - 1 tsp)

Cayenne pepper: 1g (~0.1% - ¼ tsp)

Chili powder: 1g (~0.1% - ¼ tsp)

The Process

The process of curing meat is, at its core, very simple. You put meat in salt (or salt on meat) for a period of time, and then let it dry for a period of time. I had made prosciutto before, and was amazed at the simplicity, but I really didn't understand what was going on chemically - it just seemed like magic. I wanted to know more about that, as well as find out what other meats I could cure and learn more about the history of curing (I'm kind of a history geek). 

This is a blog, so you're reading it on a computer, so you can easily find all the detailed information you want about basically anything. I have done this (I'm kind of a computer geek). But if you like books, as I do (I'm kind of a book geek), you should get a copy of Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. They go into the chemistry, as well as explaining the breakdown of a hog. They also include several recipes and some great travel stories. 

The basic goals of salt curing are (1) to reduce the amount of water in the meat and (2) to lower the pH of the meat (make it more acidic). These two changes make the meat less hospitable to bacteria such as Clostridium (the source of the toxin botulinum). Now, when I made prosciutto, I used the "salt box" or "excess salt" method, in which you bury the meat in rock salt for a long time (a month in my case), with a bunch of weight on top (400 lbs. in my case) before hanging it to dry (for at least six months in my case). This is the recommended method for big, bone-in cuts, but I was interested in smaller, boneless cuts, starting with lonzino. For this I'll be using the "equilibrium" method. 

The idea of the equilibrium method is to use only as much salt as is needed to accomplish these two goals, without making the meat too salty. Smarter people than I have determined that the ideal amount of salt is 2.5% to 3.5% of the weight of the meat. It's much more scientific than the salt box method - in fact, I'm not even sure what, if any, math really goes into the salt box method; I was just told (approximately) how much salt and weight to use, for how long, and how long to let it dry. I now know that for boneless cuts, you should let the meat dry until it loses 30-35% of its weight, but I do not know what the guideline is for prosciutto. I'll look it up next time I make one. 

One more thing I should mention: smoking. After curing, but before drying, you can also cold-smoke the meat. This adds another layer of flavor (and safety, as smoke is also a curing agent). My friend Vladimir smoked the two prosciutti I made a couple of years ago. I might eventually set up a cold-smoking apparatus, but I have to ease into stuff like that – wives only have so much capacity for gadgetry…

...beginning the next phase

A few months ago, my friend Mia asked if I would make her a leg of prosciutto.  We agreed that if she bought two legs along with the requisite salt and brown sugar, I would cure both, give her one, and keep one for my family.  When the timing finally worked out, she couldn't source the meat that weekend, and our window closed.  The weather was warming up, and the basement wasn't staying quite cool enough.

Get your mind out of the gutter!

I had been kicking around the idea of curing smaller cuts of meat and setting up some kind of drying chamber in the basement - I considered enclosing the deepest, coolest corner of the foundation in some kind of insulated box, and if necessary adding ice and/or an evaporative cooling system.  

One week, my wife and kids were going out of town for a couple of days, so without a drying system plan done yet, I went and bought a big pork loin. 

I put it in the fridge for the night and decided I would be spending the next day searching for lonzino recipes and looking on Craigslist for free or cheap refrigerators...

Back to the beginning...

My cured meat journey started back in about May 2010, when my friend Martin gave us a leg of prosciutto.  He had just cured and smoked it, and gave it to me to hang in the basement for a few months.

Martin's gift to us - the 25-lb prosciutto that started it all

This was one of Martin's first solo batch, although his dad Vladimir has been making prosciutto for years, dating back to his youth in Croatia.

We sliced into this in the fall, and it was AMAZING!  We had sampled Vladimir's at his house, and it was always great too, but to have a whole leg of our own to pull out whenever we wanted and slice a little bit off of, well that was another thing altogether...

Not long after that - in the Spring of 2011 - Martin helped me make my first two prosciutti.  We put them together in a big salt box, with about 200 lbs of salt and 450 lbs of weight on top of that.  I faithfully dug them out, flipped them, and reburied them once a week for a month, sent them to Vladimir's cold smoker for a week, and then waited.  They turned out pretty good - a little saltier and harder than I would have preferred, but wonderful nonetheless.

Those two legs lasted us a while, and then time went by, as it tends to do, and then more time as our second child was born, and then more time as we bought a condo and spent virtually every fall and winter weekend at Mt. Baker.  Curing meat never left my mind, but I never made the time to do it, until recently...