After the Soppressata, we tried our luck with a few more things. We decided to cure whole muscles this time. It was a bit of a challenge to get the right size of beef so that it would cure under the right conditions in range of time it suggested. We started by rubbing the muscles with half the salt, seasonings and herbs. We then placed them in a bag in the fridge for a week. The following week, we drained the excess liquid and added the remaining salt, seasoning and herbs and put it back in the fridge for another week. After a total of 2 weeks, we rinsed everything off, air dried them for a few hours and then hung them in the fridge to cure until they reached the target weight loss.

What we learned:
1) Use the right cure! I was nervous about curing whole muscles without the right cure (we had used Insta Cure 1 instead of Insta Cure 2) so I decided to cut the whole muscle in half. As a result, I think the meat was too small and ended up drying out too quickly. Because of this, and maybe also because we used the wrong cure, in the end our meat was brown with a pink centre. Needless to say, we’ve already gotten our hands on some Insta Cure #2, and will be retrying this again soon.
2) Monitor, monitor, monitor! The RH (relative humidity) was too low and it dried out much faster than we wanted. This is also tied to the same issue as our last post: I need to monitor the weight and conditions more closely to throughout the process.
3) Measure twice, cure once. Only after reviewing the recipe (after hanging) did I realize that the spice cure should have been ground into a fine powder. 🤦 Note to self: please pay more attention to the details.