How to Make Salami at Home

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Cooking. Today we're going to make homemade salami. Now, who doesn't love salami? It's one of my favourite foods. I kind of buy it all the time. I like loads of different types of it. Always wanted to try and make it at home. And last year, for the first time, I kind of ran a few batches through the machine and it came out really, really well. I was, I was very surprised how well it came out, so I thought I'd share with you what I do to make my homemade salami. So a few words of caution first when you're making salami, and these are really important warnings, so please do take heed. I'm using a book today called Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlmann and Brian Polking. I'm not sure that's how it's pronounced, but that's the book. But the important thing to say is when you're making any, any type of charcuterie is these are the most important thing. You need to get the weights and measurements absolutely correct. And it's not a case of if you're making a cake and you use the wrong amount of flour or you mix things in the wrong order that it's gonna maybe not rise very well and not taste good. With salami, if you get this wrong, it can be very dangerous. You can get botulism and it can kill you. So get that out of the way first. There is a small element of risk in there. Make sure you follow the recipe in a proper book. All this video is is me showing you how I do it. It's not giving you advice. So we've got that out of the way. I find there's a recipe in this book. So if you've got this book or you're interested in getting this book, there's a recipe on page 181 to Tuscan salami. So it's the first recipe that they use. It's a really, really basic bog-standard recipe, and I tweak it and add the flavours that I like. But what I do is I make sure that I've got the correct quantity of meat, the correct quantity of fat, and then the correct quantity of salt. And it's the salt and the curing agents that's really, really important. So make sure you get your measurements correct and make sure you follow the recipe within the book. So the next thing to say about it is use good quality pork. So you don't want to be going down to Asda and getting kind of like buy one get one free offers. Go to a really, really good, the highest quality pork you can afford. Go to a good farm shop and get your pork there. It might seem like it's more expensive, but it probably isn't. I went to the farm shop yesterday. I went to Swan's Farm Shop in Triden. That's my local farm shop. Absolutely amazing farm shop. I get all my meat from there. And they gave me all the pork and then they threw in the back fat for free because all they're going to use it for is kind of making up sausages. They've got loads of extra fat and they're kind of happy to give it away. Whereas if you went to Asda, I don't even know if they sell back fat on its own, but they'll definitely charge you for it. So it probably works out about the same price. So today we're going to show you how to make this standard Tuscan salami, but I'm going to tweak the ingredients. Last time I did this one, I liked it. I didn't like the strong taste of fennel though. And I like a fennel salami, but it just— I did a whole batch in fennel, so it just kind of got a bit boring after a while. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to make a standard batch of salami, and then I'm going to do maybe 2 or 3 different flavoured salamis just to kind of give you a bit of variety when you come to eat your salamis. So the final thing to say is you need to keep it cool. You can't do this in a hot room. So we've got the windows open in here, we've got all the radiators off. You need to be as cool as it possibly can be and work as quickly as you possibly can. You don't want the fat to melt. You get what's called a smear, and that's not good for salami. And obviously, the colder it is, the more hygienic it is as well. So, and again, I've missed out one really important thing. Everything needs to be really, really clean, as clean as it can be. So clean it and wash it and clean it again. Make sure it's clean. The whole idea with salami, like it was with the salmon, is you're trying to Create an environment where bacteria cannot thrive, and you do that by following the correct precautions, putting the correct amount of salt in, and making sure you don't add unwanted bacteria in there. So this Tuscan salami recipe, there's a couple of items of ingredients in there which are a bit strange, and you will need to kind of go out and order these in advance. So the first one, which you can get from smokedust.co.uk, is Prague Powder Number Two. So where it says Prague Powder Number Two. In this book it says Insta Cure Number 2. It's the same product and they're interchangeable. The ingredient that you're looking for in here is the sodium nitrite. Um, now that's difficult to get on its own and it's difficult to get the quantities right of it as well, so just make sure you're getting this smokedust.co.uk Prague Powder Number 2, and then you can use that for your Insta Cure Number 2, and that keeps you safe That's the one that kills the botulism for you. You can't sub that out for normal salt, needs to be that one. The next strange ingredient in here is called Bactoferm. It's called Bactoferm, so it's a live starter culture, and I used this on my last batch and then I froze it and it's still good to go. So I'm going to use the rest of that in the batch today. And now what this does is it increases a certain type of bacteria within your sausage so that when you ferment it for the first 24 hours, it builds this bacteria up, creates lots of lactic acid, which means that the bad bacteria can't kind of get a stranglehold, and it's really difficult for them to thrive because the good bacteria has already taken hold. The same way, if anyone's done any brewing, the same way that you'd kill off all the yeast, kill off all the nasty yeast, and then you add your own good yeast to get the fermentation that you want. Similar, similar, but what you're doing here is you're adding a good yeast to build up that lactic acid level so that the bad bacteria can't thrive. So they're the 2 difficult products that you need. The other products are, you need pork fat diced up and then coarsely minced. That's how I like to do it. You can also chop it up into very small little squares, that works as well. Boneless pork shoulder minced. I like a coarse mince for that. If you go to a good quality farm shop, they'll mince it for you. Saves a huge amount of hassle. Means you haven't got to kind of stress and get it through the KitchenAid grinder, which isn't very good. And then other ingredients, it's just they've got dextrose in here. I swapped that out for sugar. Probably should use dextrose, but any kind of sweetener will work. And then the other ingredients are just kind of salt, pepper, and flavouring. So there's nothing really important. The key ones, get the meat, the fat, the Instacure and the Bactoferm and the salt quantities correct. Don't get those wrong or you're in serious trouble. So we'll start and you'll kind of pick it up on the way. I'll pop a little— I'll pop the recipe up in the bottom and I'll kind of put little captions up on the way just to kind of give you a feel for the quantity. So I'm doing quite a big batch today, so we'll fast forward certain bits because you don't want to see me making loads and loads of sausages. So we'll get on. So that's my bag of pork. I got that yesterday, Welsh pork, cost me about £30. Bit of liquid where it sat overnight in the bag, that's fine. So we've got that working well. So I've got 3.6 kilograms of pork here. So luckily the recipe calls for 1.8 kilos, so I've done it right. I've taken a bit out to get it working, so I'm doubling the recipe. Makes it really, really easy if you can get it close to what's in there and then double it or halve it. It's It makes the numbers a lot easier and you can just do it in your head. So we start off with 3.6 kilos of diced, minced Welsh pork. So then what I've got here is back fat. So I asked the butcher for this, he gave me as much as I wanted. I cut it up, I put it through the KitchenAid coarse grinder. They might do that at the farm shop with you if you like. You can just chop that up into small cubes. I like to do a coarse grind on the back fat. It comes out like that. Keep it in the fridge, or you can put it partially frozen. You want to keep all this as cold as you can possibly get it, so it'll work quite quickly. And then you need to weigh out the correct amount of back fat to go in with the pork that you've done there. So this recipe calls for 900 grams of back fat, so we'll just weigh that out. So like I say, I've measured that out. Just wanted to double-check, get the, get the quantities right. 900 grams of back fat going in. So combine the 2 together. So just to make it a bit easier, quite a lot there, so I'll split them up 50/50. And then this helps as well, I'm going to do 2 different batches. So I'm going to do a plain batch and I'm going to do a flavoured batch. Gives me a bit of variety when it comes to eating it. So I'll just wash my hands. Right, so you could think at this point The recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of this salt, 7 grams. Weigh it, make sure you get it right. I'm doubling up and adding 14 grams. I'll do it separately so I'll make sure I get the correct amount in each. So 7 grams of Instacure— sorry, 7 grams of Prague Powder No. 2 in each. So the next thing we're adding is table salt. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, just standard table salt. This recipe, it's 56 grams. We're doubling up, so it's 112 grams, but we'll go 56 grams in each. And then you've got to get your hands in and really, really work that meat. If you want, you can run it through the grinder again a couple of times. That will work. I like to do it with my hands, but you've got to work it and work it and work it. Make sure you get that thoroughly mixed. So these go into the fridge now while we move on to the next step. Next step is you take 120 millilitres of water and then we add the Bactoferm to it. So I had enough to do 2 batches here. So give that a stir, just make sure that's fully dissolved. So then we can move on to the other ingredients. So I don't follow the recipe strictly here, I like to use my own flavourings. You need a little bit of moisture, so the recipe calls for wine, so we'll still do one with a bit of wine, and then we're going to turn one into a kind of a chorizo with some paprika and some chipotle as well. Again, you need to make sure you weigh everything out though. You need to be really, really keen here. So both of them, I like a lot of pepper. You really can't get too much pepper in your salami, in my opinion. So I give them a real good grind of pepper. So then on this one, I'm going to do a spicy chorizo sausage, so I'm putting paprika in. So I use a hot paprika. So I'm using 2 heaped tablespoons of hot paprika, and then I've got a really good quality hickory smoked chipotle powder as well. I use 2 teaspoons, heaping teaspoons of that, and then 1 teaspoon of just normal paprika. So that's my chorizo style one done. We'll add in half of the Bactoferm solution. The other half can go in here. And then I've got a little bit of leftover dry rosé wine, 125 ml in each. And then again, we get in and we mix them all up. So this recipe here, I've missed out the fennel and the garlic. I preferred it last time when I didn't add that. And you've just got like a standard salami recipe as opposed to a Tuscan salami. And then this one is like a real kind of spicy chorizo. You can put it on your pizzas, really nice. So they're my 2 recipes. I'll put up the variations, but I'm following the key ingredients from a Tuscan salami in this book. So you need to mix them up. So make sure they're really, really well mixed. Make sure the flavourings are fully incorporated, then wash your hands. So then we move on to the really fun part, and that is stuffing the sausages. So I use a hog casing. You can get these sent through the post. It's like a salted hog casing. You just need to make sure that it's fully soaked And then it kind of all untangles like that. You need to find the end of it, and then you need to feed it onto your KitchenAid sausage maker. Or if you're lucky enough to have a dedicated sausage maker, even better. The KitchenAid one isn't the best, but I don't make salami enough to warrant a proper sausage maker. So it works, but it really does help if there's 2 of you there. So you're just trying to peel it open a little bit. Once you get started with this, it is a lot easier. And you're looking to feed it on like that. Be careful, you don't want any tears. Once you get it going, it becomes quite easy. You just got to take your time with it, and you want to get the whole, whole hog casing on in one go. Right, so my camera ran out of battery last time I was doing this salami video, so I kind of only got up to a certain point. So I've done another batch and I'm going to finish the video off today. So we got to the point last time where I put the hog casings on the KitchenAid sausage machine and we were just getting ready to fill them up. So make sure you do that nice tight knot, and like I say, if you can get someone to help you at this point, really, really helpful. I had a helper last time, don't have a helper today, so I'm just going to crack on with it. It is manageable to do it on your own, definitely easier with someone else though. Just take your time and it should work out okay. So you put the machine on lowest setting to start off with. You take the sausage meat and you start pushing it through. Again, make sure everything's clean before you start. You really do need to kind of make sure you're clean. That's the whole key with kind of making salamis. Everything starts off clean. And the other thing to say, make sure all of the sausage meat is very cold, as cold as it can possibly be. Don't have the heating on in the house. Stops the fat and the sausage meat kind of merging together. So as you can see now, the sausage meat starts to come out. You'll see why it's a lot easier to do it kind of with someone else there. Just got to take your time. Like I said before, you're looking to not overfill the casings, but you don't want air pockets in there. If you feel the need to kind of adjust it, you can just stop, just hold it there, and just pull the meat down to make sure that it's nicely packed in. But don't try and overpack it. And then when you're ready to go, put more sausage meat in. Plunge it down again. So when you let it go like that, it's a bit difficult because it still fires a bit of sausage out. So all you do, you just hold it there, push the meat down, Make sure it's all even, hold it, put more sausage meat in the hopper, and then continue again as normal. So when you get to about that length, that's about the length I like to do it, maybe 2 foot long, maybe a little bit shorter than that, maybe 50 centimetres, you pull it out a little bit, create a seal, and And then make sure you give yourself enough room to tie it off sufficiently. You cut that off. And then I like to do a single tie like that. And then another tie again. So I'm no sausage expert. And there's definitely kind of correct butcher's knots for doing that. And I don't know which they are. I just do kind of like a double granny knot. That seems to work well. And then I take some of these stainless steel hooks. I bought these purposely for kind of drying salami, and then I tie the knot around one end of it. And then if you wanted just a straight salami, you can hang it like that. That's a very long straight salami though. When it starts to dry, it will curl, so you'll see it start to curl like that, and then as it dries, it will get straighter again. What I like to do though is I like to hang them in curls like that. So I tie it off. I'll just do that now. OK. And that's what you get. You get a loop effect sausage like that. So they're ready for kind of fermentation and drying now. So I'll just whack out all of the rest of them and then I'll show you what you do next. So just put that somewhere to hang for the time being. Just, I hang it up here. Obviously clean all of my sink again afterwards. So then when you move on to the next one, don't forget you need to pull it out again. Pull it out again. Tie a new knot, pull it back on to get rid of any air pockets, and then you can start the machine up again. So we'll move through all of the filling now, and then I'll show you the next steps. So here we are, here are the sausages that we've made. We've done about 4 of these this evening, but last time we did about 12, so about 16 sausages in total. Once you get it to this stage, you need to take a sterile needle and you just need to go through And anywhere where there's a bit of an air pocket, you just give it a little few stabs with the needle. I think it's kind of good practice, just do it all over, just to make sure there's kind of no air pockets. This will allow the air to get out, so just go all over with it. So then the next stage for these salamis is they need to ferment. And now I know the whole way through this video we've kind of gone on about how temperature is important, how you need to keep the temperature low. And that's for kind of like hygiene reasons, but also to keep the fat separate from the meat within the sausage. But now, because you've added the BactoFerm to this sausage, you need to ferment it for 12 hours around 25-30 degrees. And what that does is it builds the bacteria that's present within the BactoFerm that you've added. It builds up that good bacteria to create lactic acid, which makes it an inhospitable environment for the bad bacteria. That's really, really important. It's called the fermentation phase. So I just hang them up kind of in a little room that I've built, a little storage box where I can control the temperature quite nicely. I heat them to 25 degrees Celsius for about 12 hours, and then I hang them up in my drying area, which is outside, and they dry for about 30 days. You want a relative humidity of around 60 to 70%, and then you'll leave that for about 30 days. Until it's dried out, but you need to make sure that you weigh them before you hang them up to dry at the end, and then your target weight is about 60 to 70% of the original weight. So if that weighed 100 grams to start off, you want to eat it when it's around 60 to 70 grams, and then you know that it's sufficiently dried out and it's safe to eat. That's what the target is. So just to summarize, we're going to ferment that for 12 hours between 25 to 30 degrees We're then going to place it in our drying cabinet at around 15°C, relative humidity between 60% and 70%, and then our target weight at the end is 60% to 70% of the weight that it is now. So I won't keep you here for the next kind of 6 to 8 weeks while we dry the salamis. We'll ferment them, we'll hang them up, and then we'll do another video once they're all complete and they're ready to eat. So thanks for watching the video. Appreciate it's a bit of a long one. Please do take all the kind of precautions that we've discussed when making these salamis. So really, really make sure everything is clean, make sure everything is cold, and follow the correct temperatures that we've discussed. More importantly though, make sure you're using your Instacure, your sodium nitrites, your BactoFirm, and all the other kind of chemicals and processes we've discussed within here. And make sure you get your salt levels right as well. There's a lot of kind of things to take into account when you're making salami. Make sure you buy a good book though. Like I said, the charcuterie book that I've recommended, I'll pop a link up to it in the comments. That's a really, really good book. Gives you all the information you need to know about making salami. That's the one that I would recommend and just follow the recipes in there. This video is just a good visual guide as to some of the steps, but use the book as your kind of gospel when you're making the salami. So that's it for the video. I really hope you enjoyed it. We've got loads more food recipes coming up, so stay tuned. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.