The Pepperoni Project

The Pepperoni Project:

Making dry cured sausages is a really old craft. It is one of the ways that meat was preserved before refrigeration. I have made dry-cured whole muscles like pancetta and breseola but this is my first adventure into drying sausages. Traditional pepperoni is not like the pepperoni that Americans are familiar with. It is a very lean sausage. I have to tell you that the next time that I try to make it I am going to add a little fat-back. Lean sausages end up a little tough like jerky which is still good but not exactly what I am looking for. I like fat. 

This picture is from my second try. Which turned out a lot like my first try. The only difference was that in my first run at it I did not truss the sausages and they ended up ugly and funny shaped. The sliced pepperoni were oval with big wrinkles in them. No doubt they still tasted great but the aesthetics were off. 

Dry-curing sausages is truly a wonderful craft and from the looks of it you need to be dedicated to it and not let yourself give up if the first few tries do not turn out the way that you expected. Round two was not perfect but there were a lot of improvements and I expect that every time I make them in the future they will get better and better.... I hope!

A few notes to anybody that wants to give it a try: 

If you want to try making dry-cured meats and sausages I would suggest getting a good book on the subject and following directions. Cleanliness is next to godliness here. The sausages will hang unrefridgerated for up to a month. This could spell bad news and you could make yourself or your friends sick if you don't take the proper precautions. So get out the bleach and clean like crazy before you get started. Also, there is a lot of controversy about pink salts which are used in meat curing. Health junkies think that they could be carcinogenic but recent science suggests that this could be falicilic. Studies have shown that the nitrates in the salt may actually dissipate by time the sausage finishes drying. Regardless I understand the concern of the nay-sayers but even if you are anti-pink salt I suggest using it when you are just beginning to learn the craft of meat-curing. One of pink salts most redeeming attributes beyond giving the finished product a beautiful pink hue is that it prevents botulism. If you get botulism poisoning you are pretty much a goner. So use pink salt and live to make another sausage.

Every Friday at Mount St. Vincent's Children's Home we do Pizza-Friday. These are a bunch of Four-cheese, fresh tomato and basil pizzas that I made this week. I am finally getting the crust to a level of perfection. The only problem is that even though the oven gets blazing hot the heat balance between the hearth and the heat that radiates from the top of the oven is askew. This causes the bottom to finish before the top. I remedy the problem by moving the pizza from the hearth to a rack that is near the oven ceiling to finish. It works pretty well and the finished product is totally Aficionado style.

This slice right here is a perfect example of what I am trying to accomplish in the "Aficionado" pizza handle.

It puffed up to over and inch tall and is full of gaping bubbles. So much so that you can actually see clear through to the other side. You won't see this in a pizza that you buy from a chain store. Theirs has a tight crumb like white sandwich bread. That is definitely not Aficionado pizza. In order to accomplish this high-rise pizza-handle you need to have the right kind of dough and you also need to bake the pizza directly on the hearth in a really hot oven. For more info on this refer back to the dough and hearth baking part of the blog.