What do you get when you mix lean pork and beef trimmings, pork back-fat, salt, spices, a starter culture of bacteria and a little wine, stuff it in a casing, paint on some mold spores and let it hang in a controlled environment for 60 days? You get some delicious dry-cured salami — if you did it right.

In my last blog, I explained the difference between salumi and salami. We considered two types of dry-cured salumi: prosciutto and sopressata. Today, let’s turn our attention to salami, one of the most popular and oft-eaten forms of dry-cured charcuterie.

According to the contributors at Wikipedia: “The word salami likely originates from the Italian word sale (salt) and it originally meant all kinds of salted [meats]. The Italian tradition of cured meats includes several styles, and the word salame soon specifically meant only the most popular kind — a salted and spiced meat, ground and extruded into an elongated, thin casing (usually cleaned animal intestine), then left to undergo natural fermentation and drying for days, months, or even years.”

In ages past, before there was refrigeration, salt became an indispensable way to preserve meats. Salt stops the proliferation of bad bacteria and expels water. So, salami is not cooked.

Old world salumi was uncultured dry sausage, consisting of salt, protein and aromatics, with natural lactobacillus and white molds on exterior surfaces. This method is referred to as slow or cold fermentation.

In modern times starter cultures of good bacteria are added to salami. A kill (lethality) step is used to drop the pH below 5.2 in combination with drying. Most commercial producers use this method because it takes less time to dry and gets to market faster for quicker returns.

But don’t confuse dry-cured salami with cotto salami, the cooked lunch meat you likely ate in your lunch box as a kid. Cotto salami is cooked lunch meat, not dry-cured or aged.

Salamis in Italy are almost always made with pork meat. Some regional variations include wild boar and even goose.

In making salami, meat is first carefully trimmed. All silver-skin, cartilage and ligaments are removed. Anything that would get stuck in your teeth must be eliminated. When using beef and pork, each is ground separately using different diameters of grind plates. The fat is also ground separately. The grinds are kept very cold to allow for good particle separation when mixed. Various spices are added, commonly salt, garlic, pepper, spices, herbs, wine and/or vinegar. The starter culture, if used, is added to the final grind.

Salamis are usually aged between 30 and 90 days (and beyond) in a controlled cooler where temperature and humidity are monitored. The amount of aging needed is determined by the thickness of the casing and the amount of salt.

A good salami must have the right balance of lean meat and fat. The tendency today, especially for industrial products, is to make leaner salami, which affects the taste and texture. You may have tried less expensive, commercial salami that looks and tastes like plastic. The commercial shiny plastic version of salami found in most retail stores is drastically different than the artisan salami of Italy and France.

In Italy, there are more than 300 regional variations of salami and it would take a lifetime to try them all. France also has its own regional variations and unique blends of meat cuts, ingredients and curing processes.

If you want to try to make your own salami, the best, easy-to-follow instructions I’ve found are on YouTube here. Subscribe to this channel by “2 guys and a cooler” and you’ll learn all you need to know to make delicious homemade salami.

My uncle and I tried making salami a few times when I was a kid growing up on the farm from the 4-H pigs that I had raised. We didn’t know about the last step of painting the external casing with mold spores (see the video mentioned above). Bad mold developed on the exterior casings as the aging continued (in a converted refrigerator) and the salami ended up with an undesirable taste.

What tips do you have for making salami? Share them here or email me at greg@usprotein.com.

Yummy salami

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