My first attempt at Dry Cured Full Muscle

As part of my continued exploration of Salumi making and Charcuterie, I wanted to try to create a high quality cured product that was not made of ground meats. This blog post will discuss my first attempts and show the finished product.

Spicy Coppa ready to serve!

The first recipe was for Spicy Coppa. The recipe for it is here: Spicy Cured Coppa. I made the coppa from the neck muscle of a porcelet. The inspiration for the recipe comes from the cookbook "The Craft of Italian Dry Curing - Salumi" by Ruhlman and Polcyn. The add page below will list the items I used in case you need a source.

This recipe used spicy Hungarian paprika as a final coating and the result was excellent. The picture above shows the final Coppa. The paprika dusting was not overpowering, just a decent amount of heat even though you can see the Coppa is completely covered. The next time I make it, I think I will try a fennel based rub for variety. The taste is great. The interior fat is a great contrast for the pork flavor.

Some specifics that were left out of the recipe are as follows: The coppa was cured for 2 days at 80% humidity and 64 degrees temperature. For the rest of the 4 week curing time, my curing fridge was set at 68.5% humidity and 56.5 degree temperature. The starting weight of the Coppa was 2 lbs 7 oz. and the final product was 1 lb 9 oz. Total weight loss of 14 oz.

If you don't want to make it yourself, you can purchase some coppa or lonza below.

My second attempt at curing was for wild boar lonza. This is made from the Striploin cut of the pig. The Lonza was spiced only with crushed black pepper. This allowed the flavor of the fat on the striploin and the wild boar meat to come thru. A link to my recipe is here: Wild Boar Lonza. I loved the result of this recipe. The flavor of the meat is wonderful and the fat when sliced thin was melt in you mouth tasty. When D'artagnan has the wild boar striploin on sale again, I will be a buyer. Their wild boar has a nice cap of fat left intact on the meat that cures wonderfully.

Melt in your mouth goodness!

One last item to note is that for all my dry cured meats, I freeze the meat for a couple of weeks to kill any trichinosis that may be present. Most modern Salumi cookbooks say this is most likely not required today, but why risk it.

This curing effort has encouraged me to continue with whole muscle dry curing and eventually I would like to cure a culatello which is related to Prosciutto.