To Make a Salami, Part 4, Second Try, Goat Panchetta
Okay, here we go for reals. After my first attempt, Basque Cured and Air Dried Chorizo, I made air cured Goat Panchetta! Rad.
So I got some goat riblets, a fancy way of saying the meat on the ribs on the side to the animal. They would be the sparerib meat on a pig or the short ribs on a cow. Anywho, they are about a foot by half foot square and maybe a finger thick. I was going to make bacon with them, the cured way, not the smoked way, and test out the new settings with the curing chamber. And the steps to doing that are thusly, first, season them and let them get spiced and nitrated up in the fridge, secondly, roll them up in some casing, and, lastly, hang in the curing box until 35% of their weight has evaporated.
So firstly…
To the spices, they were pretty straight forward and generically tradition Italian. Salt, sugar, mace, coriander, nutmeg, white pepper, rosemary, and the always important Prague #1. Mix them up in a bowl and generously rub half the mix into the meats. Then I let the meats rest up in the fridge, at 36°F no humidity, in sealed bags to get all spicy. Left in fridge for 4 days, brought out, rubbed the second half into the meats, and back into the fridge , at 36°F no humidity, for 4 more days. After the week and a day, I brought the sides out and soaked in the sink for half an hour to get the excess salts off. Then I hung in the cure box on my homemade bacon hooks, at 55°F no humidity, for 3 days.
After they hung in the cure box for 3 days, I brought them out and rolled them up into their fibrous casing. I soaked the casing for a couple hours first, then couldn’t get the large rolls of panchetta into them, so I cut the rolls open and laced over the rolls in their casing. These rolls I then hung in the cure box for three weeks at 55°F and 50% humidity until they had lost a third their weight from when they first were hung. Success.
Delicious flavor, not too salty, and a good amount of the normal goat gamy-ness is dissipated. The meat was very firm but not dry at all and you could feel the oily texture when you squeezed it. Just like salami.