Charcuterie

To make high quality and consistent dried meat you need to keep yearly notes on your activity.  Start off with the basics, where did you buy the meat, how much did you pay for it, what cuts did you buy, how much did it weigh?  I always assumed I'd remember for next year but unfortunately life has a funny way of getting more complicated and faster year after year.  The best reason to keep diligent notes is so you can tweak your recipe the following year.  Not enough garlic, too much hot pepper, not enough salt etc.  With notes its easy to modify, if your guessing, good luck! After you've bough your meat and you've cleaned off the fat, silver skin and any gristle its time to weigh your meat and write the weight down.  Your cure is going to vary from 2% salt by weight to 5% salt by weight.  The larger the piece of meat the more cure it will need to properly dry, as a example a pork loin may take 2% salt, a pork shoulder (coppa) 2.5%, a prosciutto 5%....

The smoke house is complete, now its time to begin the curing process.  I did a lot of research on the topic of curing meat by asking the older generation, through books and internet research.  The typical answer I got when asking someone how they cure meat was interesting.  They would have the process down pact but when I asked about specifics, like how much salt to add their answer was always the same... just eyeball it!  Unfortunately I can't eyeball it, I live in the world of absolute not approximate.  I turned to the internet and more specifically to a great book by ____ which gave me more scientific information. Basically, there are 5 steps in curing meat: Purchasing and processing the meat. Weighing the processed meat and adding the cure. Equalization period. Smoking the meat (optional). Drying the meat. Not very complicated as a whole but each step has several sub steps that are important to the success of the final product. Lets begin with ...