Homemade Sausage Making

Man, do I have the best wife or what?

Nice! If you use any of the dry cured salami recipes check with us on the amount of FRM 52 culture to use. They recommend 20 gram per 5lb, which is overkill, and costly. While that amount won't hurt, a smaller amount is plenty. You should also do your own salt and cure calculations, a good habit to get into!

Yeah, I've read several warnings about the cure quantities used in the recipes. I got a lot of education from our past discussions! I check all the recipes on a percentage basis now. I will check back on the FRM 52, as fermented sausage is still uncharted territory for me. I really need to get some beef bungs so I can get a Lonzino going in my chamber.

This Sunday will mark 1 week to go on the ham-o-collo. I know in your recipe you mentioned curing for 2-3 weeks. A dumb question perhaps, but since it will have been in the cure for 2 weeks, is it possibly ready? This was a 10# loin I cut in half to two 5# pieces. Sure would be great to serve this as an appetizer for Easter Sunday. When I've done Canadian bacon before, I cured for 1 week, but used an "excess salt" method, not an equilibrium cure.

Sure. 10 days is long enough to be cured, the extra time is more time for the flavors to penetrate.

New " Ham" flavor in the works, should be interesting as we really enjoy dry cured Orange Lonzino.

Ah cool. Well that'll work out just fine then. I'll pull one of them and cook it, then I'll do the other one at the 3 week mark and give 'er the ol' taste test. I did see that orange Lonzino elsewhere, at first glance it seems kinda odd, but i'd give it a try.

Bob K wrote:Nice! If you use any of the dry cured salami recipes check with us on the amount of FRM 52 culture to use. They recommend 20 gram per 5lb, which is overkill, and costly.

Just for giggles, I checked what the rate shoudl be for 5# of meat... 0.57g! Holy moly, you aren't kidding about the overkill and the cost.

Well that's the amount that the culture is capable of fermenting... . To get a viable amount a good rule of thumb is to start with 1/4 rounded teaspoon ( around 3-4 grams) for up to 10lbs or 5 kilograms and add .022% additional culture to every additional kilo.