Maybe it’s the change in the weather but I’ve recently had a hankering for some good dry sausage. I just finished off a stick of sweet Abruzzese, and am wondering what I should try next. Salty, or spicy, or garlicy. Hmmm. Too many choices. Anybody have a personal favorite, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks.
Can you define “dry” sausage, as opposed to…?
Fresh sausage.
A dry sausage has gone through a long curing and drying process and would include salami, pepperoni and the like, but would not include kielbassa, brats, chorizzo, and what not.
If it’s hard and eaten uncooked it’s probably a dry sausage. And now I’m hungry again.
I’m partial to Old Wisconsin Party Bites, myself.
I love genoa salami in a sandwich with provolone cheese, roasted red peppers, and a little onion, tomato, and deli mustard, maybe on a nice onion roll. One of my favorite sandwiches ever.
Soppresata is a nice one – it has a good kick, but isn’t too spicy. I also like dried chorizo, which is abundant around Florida supermarkets without even having to hit the ethnic markets.
I don’t really have a favorite dry sausage - I love 'em all. Right now, I’m enjoying some capicola that I made my own self starting back in January. I made it using an old family recipe, and it’s a lot like eating the best prociutto you’ve ever had, but with a cracked pepper crust.
I’m a particular fan of the finocchiona from Salumi, though I like most of the others as well.
Hot damn, that sounds amazing. Care to share the recipe?
It’s fairly easy, and more of a technique than a formal recipe.
You’ll need two whole boneless pork loins, a pound of natural sea salt, a gallon of cheap white wine (I use Carlo Rossi chablis) half a pound of coarsely-ground black pepper, some large natural sausage casings (beef casings - you can usually get them at a local butcher shop) some plain pine slats, and a package of plastic wire ties.
On the first day, cut each pork loin into two equal half-loins, but don’t trim any of the fat. Rub them well with a thick coating of salt and put them in some kind of non-reactive container for two days. A small Playmate cooler or other small white-plastic (food grade) cooler is perfect for this. Leave the pork in a cold but not freezing place for the curing time (I used my cold attic, but you can put it on an enclosed porch or if you’re keeping the meat in Tupperware, in your fridge.)
On the second day, take the sausage casings and wash them out well. They’re going to be a little dirty, and they will almost certainly be packed in salt of their own. Rinse the casings, inside and out, and let them soak in a bowl of water for a couple of hours to soften up. Don’t be afraid to rinse them again. When the casings are ready, take the pork out of the cooler and put it in a colander. Use the cheap white wine to wash off the salt, then put the pork into a shallow pan with the black pepper and roll it around until the entire outside of the loins are well coated.
When the pork is coated, bunch up a sleeve of the casing, and pull it over the pork. It’s kind of like putting on a condom, if you’ll forgive the metaphor. The pork loin will fit tightly into the casing. Squeeze out any air that gets under the casing, but don’t prick holes in it.
Most dry sausages are dried with string tied around them. Every couple of days during the drying process, the string has to be retied a little tighter as the sausage loses moisture. This is a major pain in the ass, so my grandfather came up with the great idea of binding the sausage with plastic wire ties; that way, all you have to do to tighten them is pull them a little tighter with a pair of pliers every now and then. It works great. Put four wooden slats, each about an inch wide, a quarter inch thick, and the length of the sausage, along the casings on the outside, fasten them with four or five plastic ties, and pull the ties tight. It will look like you’re putting the sausages into splints.
Tie some string around the sausages like you’re tying up a package. Leave a big loop on one end and use the loop to hang the capicola in a cool, dark place for about 2 months. I hung mine in a closet in my unheated attic - we make the cappy in late January or early February and slice it in early April.
Every couple of days, visit the capicola with a pair of pliers and pull the tie wraps a bit tighter. You’ll notice that the outside of the casings get stiff and firm and develop some white spots (the spots are dried bits in the casing and you don’t have to worry about them.) The meat will start darkening, turning a reddish brown. Just keep tightening them a couple of times a week. By the time you are ready to slice them, the fat parts will be very thin, a creamy ivory white, and the lean parts (the majority of the capicola) will be a rich, dark, chestnut red.
At the end of 60 days, the capicola should have lost almost an inch in diameter and be about four inches in diameter, but just about as long as it was when you first hung it. It will be dry and hard to the touch, and quite firm if you give it a squeeze. Now you can cut it down from the hangars.
Take the capicola to the kitchen and cut the plastic wire ties and pull off the wooden slats, which by now might be sticking to the casing. Don’t freak out, because there will be mold under the wood. It’s harmless, and will not have penetrated the casing, which you’re going to remove anyway.
Slip a knife carefully between the casing and the meat, and you’ll be able to peel the casing off, revealing the capicola itself. It will be dark, dry, and firm, not at all greasy, not even the fat parts. If the casing developed holes and some mold got through, just shave off the moldy bits, and remember that it’s not poisonous.
Your capicola is now done, and ready to eat. Slice it paper thin with a good sharp ham slicer, or use a deli-style meat slicer if you like.
This method will make four four-to-six pound capicolas, and that’s a lot. So I usually cut each one into four chunks and use a Kenmore vacuum sealer to cryovac the ones I’m not going to use immediately. Kept in the vacuumed plastic and in the fridge, the unopened capicola will keep about a year.
If you any part of the post isn’t clear, just ask and I’ll try to explain things a little better.
That is AWESOME, seriously. I just worry that here in the subtropics, we’d get too much moisture, mold, muggy weather, or marauding roaches and ants in order to make sausages at home.
Hot damn, Uvula Donor! I know what I’m doing this coming winter. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Eh? There’s more than one type of chorizo and at least in Spain (where it originates), it’s most commonly a dry sausage.
I don’t talk about it in polite company.
Uvula Donor, am I reading correctly that the pork loin is not ground or chopped? It’s just stuffed in there? When you say to cut it in half, is that down the length?
Forgot to mention my favourite. Although I like Chorizo a lot, my favourite would be Danish Ålerøget Spegepølse, which is a hard, smoked salami.
I like German landjäger and our own, homegrown droëwors - dried South African boerewors, all coriander-y and really, really dry.
No grinding or chopping, correct. Cut it in half crosswise, as though you were cutting the loin into two pork roasts to fit in your oven. Capicola is much more like a ham than a sausage, but I figured the casing and the dry curing time qualified it for the thread.
Commercial capicola often is made by pressing together several different smaller cuts into the casing, but my grandparents told me that back in Italy, it was always made from a whole muscle. They used to use what they called the “collo” - I think it was a large muscle that goes along the top shoulder of the pig at the base of the neck. My grandmother said that they can’t get that piece in America, so they started using the whole loin instead.
Lots of good suggestions here. I read a bit about the droëwors before and it does sound mighty tasty.
Hmm. Here in the states I’ve only ever seen fresh chorizo before , but damn I’d love to try me some dried. Thanks for correcting me on that.
Apparently outside Europe, chorizo is most often chorizo fresco. The cured stuff in Europe seems to come in endless varieties - some of them are fat and hard like salami, some are cured, but softer and finely-textured inside; some seem to be quite ‘porky’, others seem to be very ‘bacon-y’.
I like the softer ones best, chopped or minced and fried with onions as the basis of a sauce for pasta.
Portugese, too. (See Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles cookbook, page 79.)