Mortadella

First off I need to say that this recipe came from Marc Vetri's book Rustic Italian Food, a great book for anyone interested in cooking classic Italian dishes.  Mark, and his co-owner and exec chef Brad Spence at the Philadelphia restaurant, Amis are doing some really impressive things in the realm of Salumi.  This is a recipe for Lamb Mortadella but I replaced the Lamb with all pork butt.  Also I didn't use any cure #1 (only because I didn't have any at the time and got impatient) which is recommended for all slow cooked Salumi.  I asked Chef Spence, via twitter if it was okay to eat the Mortadella without the cure and he said yeah, the only effect would be the color and the fact that it wouldn't keep as long.

Here's the cubed fatback, the slightly pink fat is actually fresh fat that I sliced off and froze from another especially fatty pork butt.

8 ounces of this stays whole and gets blanched for 30 seconds then chilled.  It goes into the Mortadella whole to give it that traditional appearance in the end result.

Here it is after the first grin, no other ingredients are added yet except for pork and fat.

And again after another 4 passes through the food grinder.

You can tell how much smoother and light pink the texture is.  At this point you add in your spice as well as the dehydrated milk, sugar, unflavored gelatin, pistachios, ice water, salt, wine and other ingredients and mix to further emulsify.

And mix.

Stuff mix into meat stuffer and begin to stuff.  This is a 5lb hand crank stuffer from LEM, a much better tool than the 12 dollar sausage stuffer attachment from Kitchenaid.

After it is stuffed (here in a 100mm sythetic casing) it's poached at a low temp of 160-170 for 2-3 hrs and until it maintains an internal temp of 150.  Sorry it was pretty late by the time I got around to poaching it that night and I forgot to take any pics of that process but there's really nothing to it, pretty boring actually, just find a roasting pan big enough for your Mortadella and keep an eye on the temp with a submersion thermometer.  Also make sure it fully cools before slicing into it as it will firm up as it cools. Since I didn't use any cure#1 the color came out like a giant Bratwurst.  the flavor is great I'm just a little unhappy with the overall texture, it's too crumbly almost like meatloaf.  I think this may be because it didn't emulsify enough.  Next time I'm going to use a food processor and see if I can get a tighter mix.

Definitely pick up the book Rustic Italian Food by Marc Vetri if you want a more in detail explanation and recipe.  Thanks again and keep checking back for more posts!