Italian sausage with mold title. Meat Italy: the most delicious sausages and delicacies. Finocchiona - sausage with onion

), I decided to stick with Italian salami. Unlike Hungary, where salami is obligatory smoked, in the Apennines this sausage is dry-cured, but at the same time it has a characteristic recognizable taste due to the use of traditional Italian seasonings. Also, this time I decided to use beef casing instead of pork casing and change the drying process to make the recipe easier.

The result did not look too much like a neat salami from an Italian supermarket, but it turned out to be very similar to those handmade sausages that I once bought in or on: a unique irregular shape, the same fragrant, slightly awkward and very tasty. Perhaps the epithet "homemade Italian sausage" fits her perfectly.

Italian homemade salami

Complexity
average

Time
2 hours + 2 weeks

Ingredients

2 medium or 4 small sausages

80 cm beef

860 pork ham

140 g. fat

23 g nitrite salt

10 ml. dry white wine

10 g sugar

3 g black pepper

3 y. dried garlic

1 g fennel seeds

Soak the beef casing and rinse under running water to prepare it for sausage making. Soak the fat in advance in cool water, then cut it into layers about 1 cm thick and put it in the freezer for 1 hour. Cut the pulp from the pork ham into cubes with a side of 3 cm and put it in the freezer for 3 hours so that they harden slightly - the minced meat from such meat will turn out chopped, and not shapeless, which will positively affect the texture of the finished sausage. In the same freezer, remove the removable parts of the meat grinder, as well as the hook and bowl of the mixer, if you have one, or the spatula with which you will knead the minced meat. Remember, the key to our success is the minimum temperature of minced meat at all stages of cooking.

Pass the meat through a meat grinder with a large grill, cut the bacon into small cubes with a sharp knife and combine in a mixer bowl or metal container. Add nitrite, white wine and all the spices, ground in a mill or thoroughly crushed in a mortar, and mix quickly but vigorously (ideally with a stand mixer, if not with a spatula).

Every time I write about sausages, I get questions about nitrite salt, and, apparently, someday I will talk about it in more detail. In the meantime, I want to note that nitrite salt is indispensable in the manufacture of dried sausages, since the sodium nitrite contained in it inhibits the reproduction of undesirable microflora and gives the sausages a pleasant color, and its concentration - 0.5-0.6% - is absolutely safe for the body. Nitrite salt and casings, like everything else for making Italian homemade sausage, I purchased on the website kolbaskidoma.ru.

Install the sausage attachment on the meat grinder and, tying the casing on one side, stuff it tightly with minced meat (it is best to do this together so that the minced meat is evenly distributed). When the stuffing is over, tie the casing on the other side, rewind it in several places to divide the long sausage into smaller sausages, pierce with a toothpick where air bubbles appeared, and wrap with twine. Hang the sausages in a dry and cool place (a glazed loggia is ideal) and dry them for 5-8 days until they become elastic and hard to the touch and lose 30-40% of their original weight.

Another traditional warning is about mold. It may appear on the surface of the sausage during drying, and in no case is evidence of its deterioration. If the mold is white, which is what you want, cherish it and cherish it, as it in many ways forms the perfect taste of dried sausage. If the mold is green or dark in color, wipe it off with a piece of cheesecloth soaked in vinegar and try to prevent it from reappearing.

Ready-made sausage can be eaten immediately with sandwiches or as a meat snack, but since you most likely did not have the opportunity to control the humidity and air temperature during drying, it could turn out that the outer layers dried out before the inner ones. The ideal way to fix this is to vacuum seal your sausages and leave them in the fridge for a week to even out the moisture levels inside the sausages. If you don’t have a vacuum sealer either, well, you will have to come to terms with the fact that voids may appear inside the sausage, which, however, should not affect its excellent taste in any way.

Is it possible nowadays to make sausage without preservatives? Absolutely without them, most likely, it is impossible, because. table salt is also a preservative. But without all sorts of E-E and similar horror films, it’s quite, if you follow the old technologies that were used by the peasants of the southern Italian Cilento.

Having heard about the cellito pig farm, which produces excellent sausages, I set out to make a report on their production. Detto fatto!

The farm's sausage shop was located near the town of Sicili, which is ten kilometers from the place where we spend our summers in southern Italy. We were expected early in the morning somewhere among these forests of the Cilento e Vallo di Diano National Park

At 7 am, work was already in full swing. The July heat dictated its schedules to the Norchins. I hope that my readers remember that this term in Italy defines the profession of a butcher who processes pork.

In the workshop was one of the owners of the farm Giovanni Cammarano and his assistant. Knowing about the popularity of Cellito dry-cured sausages, my impressions began with surprise at the small number of staff in the shop. The explanation for that surfaced then by itself.

We left all conversations with questions and presentations for later, because. the sausage production process called Cilento sopressata (sopressata di Cilento) has already been launched.

They explained to me that for this refined sausage, the best meat comes from the carcass: fillet and upper part of the thigh. The meat is chopped quite thinly in order to obtain a uniform and dense texture of the finished product on the cut.

Chopped meat was carefully weighed, and only then transferred to a machine for kneading minced meat.

The moment of weighing is one of the most important, on which the quality of the future product depends: the mass and consistency of the meat determine the required amount of salt for minced meat. Gianni determined the consistency of the meat by touch, after which he calculated the required weight of salt. I immediately asked: “How much?!”

Aha! This was the only secret in sausage technology that was not revealed to me. Otherwise, any more or less good sausage could be served in the showrooms of the Valentino fashion house. (This is already an excerpt from conversations in the smoking room))))))

Sopressata - sausage, practically dietary. The fat content in the sopressate is only 5%. Lard is cut exclusively by hand in order to maintain its consistency in the finished product.

The second photo shows how the worker grinds pieces of lard in order to separate them: otherwise, then they will be crowded in minced meat in one place.

For the same purpose, those same pieces of fat were distributed over the surface of the minced meat more than once. Simultaneously with a portion of bacon, a portion of salt, previously mixed with black peppercorns, was scattered.

After each portion of fat and salt, the machine was turned on for half a turn, then the next doses were distributed again.

If you return to the title photo of the post, you can see the result of this method of adding ingredients: on large sausage slices, the inclusion of fat is quite uniform.

Until the moment of the minced meat kneading operation, there was no mention of the old peasant methods of sausage production. It was here that the experience of many generations of local peasants began to appear, whose sausages were known even by the ancient Romans.

One does not need to be too educated either in history or in gastronomy to assume the complete absence of mechanization of sausage production among Lucans. The ancient Lucans were the ancestors of the current population of the Cilento.

The Lukans used to knead the minced meat with their hands only. Labor-intensive manual kneading had a lot of advantages for obtaining a quality product: meat fibers were less destroyed, but at the same time, meat juices, which were actively released in the presence of salt, glued the fibers together well.

Blinding cut meat fibers in minced meat is precisely the ultimate goal of kneading it. Gianni uses the principle of delicate handling of the product, mixing the minced meat for a very short time.

To speed up the effect of gluing the meat fibers, he simply added about a liter of mineral water. In the sausage industry, milk powder is used for this, because. it is unlikely that minced meat is made from good juicy meat.

When a piece of minced meat stuck to his hand, Jani considered the process of kneading the minced meat complete.

The peasants left the mixed minced meat to “reach” all night in a cool room. We also left ours and went out onto the veranda to take a sip of coffee and fresh air. Well, talk, of course.

Now I can tell my readers about Gianni Cammarano and his case what he himself told me.

In Italy, there is an expression “dalle stalle alle stelle”, which can be literally translated as “from the stables to the stars”, which in meaning corresponds to our expression “from rags to riches”. Gianni laughs that this expression applies to him in reverse, i.e. "from the stars to the barn." After graduating from the University of Milan and having worked for 15 years in a five-star Milan hotel in an important position, he once left everything and returned to his homeland in the Cilento, which is called “to the roots”.

The Cammarano family has a long history of breeding and fattening pigs. In 1993, a pork sales crisis arose in Italy, so the family was forced to start processing meat on their own. In 1995, a small sausage shop was opened on the farm, in which they began to produce dry-cured pork products, traditional for the Cilento. Gianni took up the production of products, its commerce.

The sausage shop is located on the territory of the national park, which is also designated as WWF Oases. Absolute silence, crystal air, the beauty of the surrounding nature, not the slightest hint of rush and stress - all that, probably, Gianni lacked at his stellar work in Milan. Here, all of this is in abundance.

While we were talking in the fresh air, the minced meat “reached” the condition, which became noticeable by its slightly darkened color.

Animals on the farm are free-range, and in the warm season they are driven out to pastures. Sausages from the meat of such pigs are distinguished by a darker shade.

This feature even played a negative role at the very beginning of the formation of the sausage production of the economy, because. commercial firms were suspicious of unusually colored sausages. It's good that there were gastronomes who appreciated the quality of products and even made them fashionable not only in the region, but also abroad.

Minced meat was loaded into a filling machine, and ...

...began to fill the sausage casing with it.

The natural pork casing used for sausages is purchased from Germany. Half of the workshop equipment is also of German production.

Interestingly, a small machine that doses and bandages sausages affects the cost of production more than any other device. Now two people handle all the work in the workshop, and earlier only up to 8 workers worked on dressing sausages. Now the task of the worker is only to prick the shell in order to release the air.

Now buyers are already accustomed to both the darker shade of sopressate and its rounded shapes.

And just a few years ago, in order to be successfully sold, a copressate had to have a flattened shape. Even to non-Italian readers, the very name "sopressata" may suggest that the sausage must have been subjected to a press.

This is exactly what Gianni says while I photograph his story.

The packaged sausage was placed under a press so that the sausage mass was compacted.

Machine packaging under pressure a priori compacts the sausage mass, so there is no need to put the sausage under the press. But ... they still put it made for the Valentino fashion house and for especially important gastronomic events: traditions dictate their requirements!)))

Sausage is made in the workshop once a week, on Friday. This is due to the fact that on Monday there is a slaughter of pigs that have reached a mass of 110-120 kg; on Tuesday the meat is cooled; on Wednesday and Thursday, meat is deboned; on Friday it is processed into sausage.

Each batch of sausage must be certified with its number and release date. In this way, it is possible to trace the path of products and easily remove them from sale if the meat analyzes, which are mandatory at each slaughter, suddenly turn out to be not entirely satisfactory.

Packaged sausages were moved to the basement of the workshop in the cooling chamber. The sausage will stay in this chamber for 6 days, during which the temperature will be gradually reduced from 24 to 12 degrees.

The humidity in the chamber will also vary: from 92 to 65%. Approximately this is how the humidity of the air changed in winter in peasant houses, over the fireplaces of which such sausages were hung.

After 6 days, the sausages are transported to the ripening chambers, where they stay from 60 to 180 days. Uniform coating of the shell with mold indicates that the process is in the right order. It is easy to see that the shape of sausages at the beginning of ripening and at the end change slightly due to the loss of moisture.

Ripe sausages are cleaned of mold and packed under vacuum. Such packaging prevents further loss of moisture. The peasants kept, and now they keep!!! sopressate under a layer of melted lard.

Sopressata was once a great delicacy. From the best pieces of meat of one or two pigs, which the peasant family slaughtered in January, they made such a sausage for big holidays. The first loaf of sausage was cut in June during the feast of St. Blaise, the patron saint of cattle and the town of Sichili, where the Cammarano family comes from. Just about 180 days have passed since the pigs were slaughtered.

As I hinted above, a sausage called Sopressata antica, i.e. ancient, is the most refined product of the workshop. My readers can only imagine the taste of this sausage, which contains only excellent natural ingredients.

It remains for me to note that I conducted a small experiment with the sausage, which consisted in the fact that I left the sausage cut in the refrigerator for a long time. I wanted to see if salt crystals would show up on the surface of the cut. This often happens with similar products of industrial production, which do not spare salt for the best preservation of their products.

Not after a week, not after two, not after a month, not the slightest salt coating appeared on the cut surface of the Cellito copressate. This suggests that the salt concentration in the product was calculated with sniper precision between the harmony of taste and the need to preserve the product. Therefore, such a sausage is served at Valentino.

Having finished with the sopressata, Gianni took up the salsa. This is the name of the most famous sausage in the history of southern Italy. It was this sausage that the ancient Roman gourmets liked, who called it Lucania.

Salsicha is a fatty sausage. It contains up to 25% fat. This sausage tastes more “male” or something, because. the grinding of meat for her is coarse-grained, more noticeable in the finished product.

For the production of salsich, the meat from the carcass is used, which is left over from the production of copressates. A small amount of fillet is also left for this type of sausage, so that the product is more tasty.

Red hot peppers and fennel seeds serve as obligatory ingredients in minced meat. Although wild fennel is a dime a dozen in the area, the seeds for production must be sterilized, which, fortunately, does not deprive them of flavor.

Fennel seeds and pepper powder are mixed with a weighed dose of salt.

Acquaintance with the homeland of Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus would be incomplete without tasting Italian sausages, whose names have long become synonymous with exquisite taste and unsurpassed quality. What varieties are worth trying in Italy - this will be discussed in this review.

Mortadella

The homeland of this boiled sausage is Bologna, so in other regions of Italy it is often called Bolognese. Tourists trying it for the first time, mortadella impresses not only with its wonderful delicate taste, but also with its impressive size. The sausage has a cylindrical shape, and one loaf can weigh from 0.5 to 100 kilograms!

Mortadella is made from minced pork with pieces of tender bacon, which is why the pattern on the cut resembles a mosaic. Other types of meat are often added to pork: veal, beef or horse meat. The composition of some varieties of sausage includes cracklings and offal. Garlic, pepper, pistachios, nutmeg, and dried myrtle berries are used as spices.