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I've wanted to try dried sausages for a long time and I finally stuck my toe in the water. With the Umai membrane to dry it, a standard kitchen refrigerator is used instead of a curing chamber. It's going to be interesting to see how the pepperoni turns out. For the first two 5 lb batches I'm using Umai's pepperoni spice blend. I bought the 50mm casing kit this time to see how things are going to turn out. They also sell a 32mm casing.
I still had some venison to use so I ground that to start with. Most pepperoni recipes I've found for 5 lbs calls for 1.5 lbs lean beef3.5 lbs lean pork and .5 back fat or something near those proportions. A local butcher sells what they call "meaty trim for $1.99 and it looks to me like about 60% lean/40%fat. So for this batch I had a package of venison that was 1lb 12oz. I finished the rest of the 5 lbs with the coarse ground "meaty trim".
The first batch I made 3/14 and just finished the second and hung it in the basement to ferment. It's my first shot at using a culture for fermenting. The kit came with Bactoferm T-SPX. The should know what they're talking about so I used it. It's pretty simple. The chubs hang at 65-75F for 24 to 72 hours. You can tell its fermenting because the color turns the "cured" red color. After that they moved to the fridge. It should be a modern frost free fridge to get enough air exchange for the humidity to dry the sausages.
I'll be throwing a couple of stuffed pics in just after I post this.
Oh....the hard part is waiting for the 4-6 weeks for it to dry. The 32mm is supposed to only take 2-3 weeks. It will be finished when it's lost 35-40% of its original weight.
Let the thumb twiddling begin....this is worse than smoked cheese!
First batch
Second batch
I still had some venison to use so I ground that to start with. Most pepperoni recipes I've found for 5 lbs calls for 1.5 lbs lean beef3.5 lbs lean pork and .5 back fat or something near those proportions. A local butcher sells what they call "meaty trim for $1.99 and it looks to me like about 60% lean/40%fat. So for this batch I had a package of venison that was 1lb 12oz. I finished the rest of the 5 lbs with the coarse ground "meaty trim".
The first batch I made 3/14 and just finished the second and hung it in the basement to ferment. It's my first shot at using a culture for fermenting. The kit came with Bactoferm T-SPX. The should know what they're talking about so I used it. It's pretty simple. The chubs hang at 65-75F for 24 to 72 hours. You can tell its fermenting because the color turns the "cured" red color. After that they moved to the fridge. It should be a modern frost free fridge to get enough air exchange for the humidity to dry the sausages.
I'll be throwing a couple of stuffed pics in just after I post this.
Oh....the hard part is waiting for the 4-6 weeks for it to dry. The 32mm is supposed to only take 2-3 weeks. It will be finished when it's lost 35-40% of its original weight.
Let the thumb twiddling begin....this is worse than smoked cheese!
First batch
Second batch
Very nice. They look great!
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