...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...