ARGH! My kindgom for a shank of middles!

We were stymied today in sausage production by not having enough casings on hand. I am out of Beef Middles and we need a (no pun intended) crap ton of them to fill with Tuscan and Finocciona, which are both ground spiced and ready to go in giant lexans. We cased the finocciona and then ran out. I added about 4 more grams of fennel pollen, plus 170 g of moscato to the recipe and it is indeed the most delicious finocciona I've ever made. 6 weeks in a cure and I will be flouncing all about town trying to get people to put my meat in their mouths (again).

The last batch of Tuscan is nothing like what I wanted. I used a really fast acting lactobacillus and the spices were overpowered by the acidity. It is such a unique and wonderful salumi that this was a big dissapointment. The recipe is from a manifesto written by Bartolemeo Scappi and published in 1570/ Scappi was the master chef for pope Pius the V (and others). It was one of the first medieval salumi recipes I found with weights and measures included in the recipe and it is still to this day one of my favorites. I don't think I will buy the fast acting lactobacillus again. I want to taste the pig and the spices in my salumi. So I am pretty excited to be putting in another batch to cure that I think will be much better.

Tomorrow Stein and I will rest while he helps his best friend find housing up in this area. I need to do some paperwork, and to put the recipe changes into my database. I will also get out and get some more pork. I think I am roughly 30# shy of what I need. I also got my new sous vide immersion circulator and it looks great! I can't wait to try it out on the Testa next week! We will also be using it to poach off the fresh sausages for my SF Client.

Wed the fresh sausages will be the priority. Get them ground and cased and poached for delivery. I need to make another gallon of the Berber blackberry organic katsup as well, which I can do while Stein is busy tomorrow.

I am SO excited about this new Finocciona... I used the very minimum of nitrites and lactobacillus. I love the flavor of fennel pollen and I really want it shine thru.

So this week

• 2 pig heads flayed
• 2 pig heads into wet cure
• 1 Brisket trimmed out and in cure for Pastrami
• 10 pounds of shoulder in my new special cure mix for capicolla
• Finocciona ground and cased
• Tuscan Salumi ground and ready for casing
• 2 pig heads boiled off for traditional head cheese
• Fat cut and frozen
• Ordered a butt (no pun intended) ton of casings
• got my immersion circulator
• ordered my cold smoking gun
  

Not bad so far! I am pretty stoked at our progress. I think next week we will mostly case the capicolla (late in the week), sous vide the testa/heads and put a bunch of pickles into brine. Maybe make another round of preserves.

I feel like a kid the week before Christmas... euphorically excited about unwrapping my treasures in the not so distant future!