Dry Cured Sausage 101

The first step in making dry-cured sausage is gathering the right supplies and equipment. For beginners, we recommend using Bactoferm T-SPX Meat Starter Culture, which is crucial for achieving the necessary pH drop to make the meat safe to consume. Next, choose a classic seasoning like our Salami Seasoning. You can enhance the flavor by adding extra black peppercorns or even a splash of dry red wine for added authenticity.

When selecting the meat, pork is widely regarded as the best choice for dry-cured sausage. Pork butts are ideal due to their perfect fat content. Be sure to pick pork butts with good fat caps and minimal purge in the vacuum package, or buy them fresh from a local butcher for the best results.

Next, we want to grind our pork, paying close attention to particle size, which is a key aspect of what makes the presentation of dry-cured sausage special. Start by trimming off the fat cap and any other large portions of fat and grinding them separately. The pork fat should be ground once through a 3/8" plate to create nice, large fat chunks in the finished product. Grind the lean pork twice: first through a 3/8" plate and then through a 3/16" plate. We use the 3/16" plate instead of the 1/8" plate because slightly larger particles in the meat make it easier for moisture to transfer from the inside of the sausage to the surface, where it can evaporate.

While doing this, we want to mix the correct amount of T-SPX for our meat batch in warm water and let it sit for at least 20 minutes; this will start to "wake" the culture up and activate it. Add your T-SPX, Seasoning, and Sure Cure to the meat, then mix it with a meat mixer until just before you achieve protein extraction, where the meat gets sticky. Next, stuff the mixture into your casing of choice. We recommend inedible collagen casings. Although they require more preparation, they have the ideal transfer rate to ensure the meat dries correctly. Remember the "rule of 15s" for inedible collagen casings: soak them for 15 minutes in 15°C (59°F) water with a 15% salt solution.

We want to hang our sausage in the dry curing chamber at 72°F and about as high humidity as possible. T-SPX is a slower-acting culture, but it also has the lowest optimal temperature for growth, so it allows us to do the entire process in the dry curing chamber, whereas other cultures might require you to put them in a smoker or other device that can achieve temperatures above 100°F.

Now we have to talk about "degree work hours. " Unfortunately, we will have to do a little math! Fortunately, the formula is pretty easy! The formula for degree hours is simply to multiply the degrees above 60°F by the number of hours it took to reach the target pH. For anything under 90°F, you cannot exceed 1200 work hours, 90-100 is 1000 hours, and above 100 is 900 max.

What we would recommend when using T-SPX is to check your sausage after 3.5 days to see if it is below 5.3; if it is, and if that is as acidic as you want your sausage, just take the 12 (difference between our set temperature of 72° and the base of 60°) and multiply that by how many hours it was in the cabinet, in this case, 3.5 days would be 84 hours. We get 12*84+1,008, below the maximum time of 1200 hours, so we are safe!

Now that we have achieved our target pH below 5.3, we want to change our humidity and temperature and dry the sausage to the consistency we want. First, you will want to lower the temperature to somewhere around 60° (54-66 range is acceptable), and then the humidity will need to be set around 65% for the sausage to dry correctly. Now, there needs to be some swings in the humidity, so it will sometimes be around 72 and sometimes as low as the high 50s. Without these swings the sausage won't dry correctly, as this helps draw the moisture from the interior of the sausage and then let it evaporate off the skin.

Once the product has lost 25-50% of its weight, it can be pulled from the cabinet, sliced, and enjoyed! It should be stored in vacuum packages, and we recommend keeping it in the fridge for extended shelf life, but it is perfectly fine to grab some and take it on a long backpacking trip without refrigeration!