1 Combine all dry ingredients. Rub mixture all over pork jowl. 2 Place the jowl in a nonreactive container such as a casserole dish. Cover and refrigerate for a week. Turn it over and redress the mix over the meat every other day. 3 Transfer the jowl to a clean container fitted with a baking rack to elevate the meat and provide air circulation all around. Do not cover. Return to the refrigerator for three weeks, turning every day or so. (If you have room in your fridge, hang the jowl from a piece of twine and place a container beneath it to catch any drips.) 4 Within a week, slice and cook the meat like bacon. It can also be frozen.
THE ESSENTIALS Learn more about making salami
Outfit your kitchen. The two most essential pieces of equipment you’ll need are a meat grinder (for small home batches, the attachments sold for Kitchen-Aid stand mixers work well) and a quality manual sausage stuffer, such as the Italian-made Tre Spade. Equipment and supplies like casings and curing salts can be ordered from butcher-packer.com. To find an organic pig farmer near you, visit localharvest.com.
Get busy. Grind the meat and fat, add the spices and curing salt, evenly pack the mixture into casings, and then hang the salami in a cool, relatively humid environment (50°F and 70 percent humidity are ideal). A cool cellar will work well, but for more consistent results, invest in a small wine refrigerator with temperature and humidity controls. That’s a greatly simplified summary of the salami-making process. Before trying it yourself, read
Cooking by Hand, by San Francisco chef Paul Bertolli, and
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.
Be patient. You’ll need to let the meat cure as long as three months before it’s ready to eat. Good salami is like wine. They’re like living things and certain types age very well, while others can be enjoyed within a matter of weeks.
Nikolas Weinstein, 39, is a San Francisco-based glass artist who specializes in large-scale installations. nikolas.net
