Homemade Sausage Making

Hi

Quick question: a batch of cacciatore has been hanging in the curing chamber for over a month now. It's lost about 35 percent weight, it's not hard enough yet but today I noticed they are getting oily. Yes, some oil can be seen on the hog casing. I wiped it down this morning but tonight the oil is coming back.

Is this a normal thing ? Should I take them out of the chamber and hang them in the fridge ?

Thanks

Good question Nicolas and one that I myself am looking for an answer to. My Hungarian salami, cold smoked for 60 hours and dried for 3 months is dripping, and quite profusely, a thin oily exudate. The sausage seemed to have dried well, tastes fine but is somewhat crumbly. I have been meaning to contact a knowledgeable acquaintance about this but don't want to annoy him too often, so maybe CW, Igor or anyone out there can explain this phenomenon (if you can call it that) to us.

Guys, did you use anything with alcohol in it as an ingredient? Wine?
Nicolas, was the acidification rate satisfactory? And yes, at 65% yield, it's time to lower the temperature.

Nope, no wine and only a scant amount of water. I'm beginning to think that the cold smoking process may have caused the outside to dry to fast, trapping the moisture inside.

Hi Red,
As regards to the oily exudate I have quite often noticed it on original hungarian salamis when they are stored for a (too) long time. Can´t provide a scientific explanation, but in your case did you make a very finely granulated chopping/grinding of the meat?
Ideally it should be in a bowl chopper.

I think the phenomena is an indicator that the meat fibres have dried out and denatured to an extend where they just cannot "grasp" or hold on to the more fluxuous part of the fat content which just starts oozing through and out into the open...

Igor Duńczyk wrote:Ideally it should be in a bowl chopper

Geez Igor now you have me shopping for a bowl cutter! Well, I wish. The meat and fat for the Hungarian salami was ground once through a 6mm plate, so not too fine. But your explanation does seem plausible. The salami has now been hanging in my curing chamber for 3 months. I also had the same thing happening with pepperoni I made last summer and both contained amounts of capsicum and were cold smoked. Have not had this happen (so far) to non-smoked dry cured products.

Actually I think also there is a sheer physical explanation in so far that while the meat litteraly shrinks in volume because water evaporates the fat just have to drip or run away from the constricted surroundings. And of course the slightly raised temperature during cold smoking may also have contributed to softening of the fat.
OK - less likely if you keep the cold smoke below 25 - 30 degrees C, but once you get above that, the fat will start loosening.

Update: I had wine in my recipe (might have put too much in there). I just put the while bunch in the garbage. I cut into one salami and the texture was off...mushy. Smelled rancid and the Ph was close to 4.

There was no sign of case hardening but for some reason, the meat did not bind well.

It´s a bit funny about that wine addition because I´ve seen a few postings now where it seems to have caused more trouble than good. In an earlier case of sweet vermuth the additional sugar of this sweet aperitif may contribute to abrubt pH drop.

As Red pointed in another thread, if wine has a pH a low as 4.0 this probably also contributes, but what puzzles me is that the amount of wine added in most salami recipes (that I am familiar with) is usually not that substantial and doesn´t lead into a pH abyss. So there might just be some unwanted interaction between the chemical content of (some) wine and the starter culture which becomes, if not drunk, then at least behave a bit excitable

To Nic I´d say that with a 4.0 pH drop which probably also happened fast there has been precious too little time for the staphyloccocus to complete their task -which includes protection against rancidity. And the violently rapid denaturation of the meat fibres prevented any effective binding. If you used cure #2 my guess is also that a chemical analysis would reveal an amount of residue nitrite...

Which starter culture did you use for this cacciatore Nic ?

Hi Igor

I was using tsp-x. Something went wrong

Yeah - VERY much so. T-SPX is a traditional culture on the slow side compared with F-RM-52 and LHP so it must be some alien influence, most probably the wine...
It was red wine I guess?

It was red wine !