Salami Finocchiona
This batch of salami was a first for me but the description of a strong fennel flavor made it a must make. This is my first salami of any kind and one of the few fermented sausages I’ve made. I was able to source a heritage breed pork shoulder and decided to do a double batch so that I could compare store bought “factory” pork versus farmer raised heritage pork. And since I was in an experimentation mood, I decide to split each batch in half-ish so that I could compare the flavors of each at 30% and 35% weight loss.
The image above shows the two batches with a sample wrapped in plastic wrap which was for testing the pH. The pH was good so the salami was left to age. The smaller of each of the batches were the 30% weight loss test. The larger were the 35% target test. The recipe called for 30% weight loss, but the end result was a bit too soft for me (and all of my taste testers.) In the future, I’ll target 35 to 40% weight loss.
Since this was a test and I had over cured my previous bresaola, I checked the weights regularly. What surprised me was the how fast the store bought meat lost weight versus the heritage breed. After doing some research, I discovered that store bought pork is often injected with water to make it juicier for customers. This means your price per pound is not accurate because you are buying 10% of the weight as water. The other downside to this is that the salami doesn’t get a chance to develop the more complex flavors that the farm raised did.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CfpFkb7v_CA/
The pic above is 14 days into the process and the store bought pork is on target for being done a whole week earlier than the farm raised. Definitely not what I expected to happen when I started out. I expected a disparity in flavor due to the meat quality (and cost!) differences but not a curing time difference. Since the rate of weight loss was so different, I created a chart showing the differences between the sausages.
In the chart above, the A sausages are the smaller of the two and the B sausages are the larger. Pete is the name of the rancher/farmer I got the heritage pork from and not the name of the pig :)
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf7rJ71pVOD/
Results
Finally all of the sausages finished curing so we could do a side by side taste test. The results are what you would expect. The 35% weight loss salamis tasted better than the 30% ones. They had a deeper flavor and the extra moisture loss made for a better texture. Also as you’d expect, the higher quality pork made for a better product. The 30% heritage pork tasted better than the 35% store bought. The 35% heritage salami was even better. The unit cost for the store bought pork was 50% of the heritage pork cost, so I get why you’d go the cheaper route. There was a difference in flavors but it’s hard to argue that $18–20 / lb is that much better.
