I'm curing meats in a rigged refrigerator, mostly bresaola and Coppa, and am close to making salumi. I've purchased 3 hygrometers and the difference between all of them leave me very insecure when I need to control humidity for fermentation.
SmokeyGator. The ones that I have purchased were not cheap but there were no where near the best. The calibration is really tricky with what I have.
Also true solid muscle cures like Bresaola or Coppa are easy because of the Nitrite/Nitrate salts.
For my next step to Salumi I need to be assured that the culture I added to the sausage will activate through the fermentation process. I better dig deep and get something commercial grade. Colstridium Botulinum is real.
All I have done is corned beef. But that isn’t hard, it’s a wet cure.
I know enough about curing to know that you can’t play games. You have to know exactly what you are doing. This prevents me from going further at the moment. I lack the knowledge and equipment.
Equipment:
'88 Vintage Fire Magic gasser with over 4000 cooks to its credit
Large Big Green Egg
18 Inch Weber Kettle (Rescued from neighbor's trash)
Rotisserie for 18 inch kettle
Dyna Glo propane smoker
Pit Barrel Cooker
Smokey Joe with mini WSM mod
Garcima paella burner
Anova Sous Vide
Slaiya Sous Vide (gift)
LEM grinder, sausage stuffer and meat slicer (all gifts)
Low cost hygrometers (especially electronic sensor types) are notoriously inaccurate. More expensive ones are more accurate, but are still not too trustworthy in the 75-90% humidity range you probably want for fermentation. An inexpensive and quite accurate method of calibration is the use of saturated salts. Sodium chloride's water vapor equilibrium is 75% at room temperature. I put a plastic dish with ordinary table salt and water to the consistency of wet beach sand in a large zip lock bag. Then put your hygrometer in the bag and close it up. Leave it for a day and read the hygrometer, if it reads 69%, then you need to add 6% to the reading. I also put a 40mm computer fan in the bag to speed things up, but if your patient, it's not needed. If you want to put a #4 finish on the whole thing, get some potassium chloride, it has an equilibrium of 84%.
People have been curing meat since before instrumentation. You could probably stick with one of the instruments and get a feel for it.
This ain't no simple cure. Lotta small facilities are getting hammered on food safety hazards regarding dried product as a result of improper humidity levels at startup. Salmonella LOVES the low heat transfer properties of a low humidity environment.
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