Bresaola

This is a type of salumi that originated in northern Italy and has Austrian influences.  It's made with beef eye round which makes it distinct from the typical pork salumi that is most common all over Italy.  This is what it looks like untrimmed from the store

The first thing i did after taking it out of the package was rinse it then start trimming off all the silver skin and a decent portion of fat.  Out of the package it weighed 5.37lbs.

And after I trimmed it it came out to 5lb 13 oz.  Kinda gross but here is the amount of silver skin and fat that came off.

It's important to re-weigh the meat again after trimming as this will be the weight you will be basing your lost weight percentage from.

 I converted the pound weight to grams in order to make the loss weight more accurate to calculate as well as getting the spices, and salt percentages to fit.  The weight in grams was 2636.5 g.  For the cure i used 132g kosher salt and 6.5g cure#2.

There was also an unmeasured amount of black peppercorn and red pepper flakes in the cure.  I left the beef in the cure, in the fridge for three days.  I only really wanted to lose about 10% of its weight in the cure but because i was busy over the weekend it stayed in longer and lost about 22%, (589.5g).  I don't think this is really that big of a deal I've read other blogs that leave their meat to cure for up to 15 days so i guess there is more than one way to do this.  So after three days this is what i looked like.

The next step is to rinse it.  I rinsed it under the faucet with cold water then rubbed a red wine into it.  This is also the step where you would rub it with all your aromatics (spices).  After that is done it is time to stuff it in a casing.  I used a natural beef bung that I ordered online.  I soaked the bung in half water and white vinegar for 24hrs before rinsing it again, cutting it to length and stuffing the beef into it.

Once the meat is fully encased i spent a little time working the water out from between the meat and the casing.  This made the casing cling tighter to the meat.  Next is the tying process.  I used the "continuous tie" method that i picked up from the book "Salumi" by Michael Rhulman and Brian Polcyn.  This is a great book to read by the way, if you're interested in making salumi.

Finally it is ready for the curing chamber.

That's the Bresaola to the right.  In the foreground is a cacciatorini sausage and the one in the middle is a black pepper cured Coppa.