I have always wanted to cure my own meats. I mean – I’ve always wanted to do everything from scratch. I think it’s good to understand where food comes from and how to make stuff, down to every little detail. I like taking on these projects at school so that I can teach the students as well. Last year, we dabbled with koji to try to make our own cured beets, soy sauces and garums. A few years before that, we tried a cheese-making which was deemed unsuccessful. This year, I decided it was time to learn how to make our own cured meats. This is something that has been on my todo list for some time. In fact, I bought a grinder, sausage stuffer and a fridge (Curan, we named it) years ago for school and they have been collecting dust all these years! I even sought out the help of a friend of mine who now owns a butcher shop, just before the pandemic. After a one day session and years of forgetting about it, I am now ready.

Let’s begin! Sourcing ingredients was a bit of an issue for us. While we can get almost everything from Fortinos* and Amazon, one thing we were missing was pork fat. I called many butchers all over the GTA and no one seemed to want to give up any back fat for our cause. After weeks, months even, of searching, my student suggested that we go to an Asian grocery store. Lo and behold, there were bags and bags of belly fat, not back fat but it will have to do.
*I mention Fortinos specifically, because they typically have a section in January near the meat section where you can get pork shoulder, pork leg, pork belly, salt, seasoning and all types of castings ready to go.

So what have we been doing for the past 2 months? We have tried making soppressata, pancetta, bresaola, guanciale, Chinese style cured pork belly (Lap Yuk 臘肉) and duck (Lap Aap3 臘鴨腿). Here are a few lessons we’ve learned along the way:
1) The difference between Insta Cure 1 vs. Insta Cure 2. Insta Cure 1 has nitrite while Insta Cure 2 has nitrite and nitrate. Cure 1 is used for a short cure while Cure 2 is used for a longer cure.
2) Casing should be soaked ahead of time in warm water ahead of time. We found the opening and wrapped it around the faucet and let warm water through it, though we are still wondering if there’s a better way (maybe an air pump with low psi?).
3) Safety first! Chilling the equipment and freezing the meat ahead of time is crucial. A bucket of ice underneath the bottom of the bowl where the meat extrudes out of also helps.
4) Make sure you scale out your initial weight and calculate target percentage loss, typically people will say 30% – a tag with initial, target final and date helps.
5) Tying the meat. It’s not easy! I couldn’t tie the meat properly, so I had to get a student to YouTube how it’s done. It’s her job now.
6) Make sure you remove the blade if using a sausage stuffer/grinder. On our second try, we didn’t use the standalone stuffer and instead tried the stuffer function built-in with our grinder. Unfortunately, we left the blade in by mistake so our soppressata was over-emulsified to the point that we couldn’t call it a soppressata any more, (but we hung it anyway).

Overall, it was a fun experience for me. We will definitely try to do and post more as I pull the meats off when they are ready.