Salami Haywood

Our goose hunting field is called Haywood. Part of a farm owned by our good friends Lawrence & Becky, Haywood was where we cut our teeth on goose hunting.

The blind is situated in the middle of a hedgerow, with rotted out fence posts and cedar branches wrapped up in honeysuckle. The ground inside is covered in spent shotshells that span back decades, and the dirt beneath that is streaked with white from decomposing oyster shells, part of a colonial-era midden. From the blind, you can smell the brackish water of the Potomac River throwing itself along the cliffs that drop abruptly from the field edge. It's a good place to kill geese.

We've spent a lot of time in that blind- warm, bluebird days and icy, windy mornings. Some days with birds locked up while we are setting out decoys, and some days where the birds stay a mile high and never give us a look. 

It’s the first place we hunted with our friend Cameron and his father Lawrence. It's a place where we have laughed so hard our sides hurt, and been so cold that we can’t draw a breath. It's a moderately sized field on a peninsula full of similar fields. On a map it doesn't look special or distinct. But it's different to us- it holds meaning and memories that are ours alone. 

And so, this salami is distinctly ours. We used goose meat, fennel, and garlic from the farm and sugary persimmons we gathered along the field edge. The pecans are grown on the farm as well- we like to munch on them while standing around the wood stove trying to warm up.

This was also our first batch of salami using beef middles instead of pork casing. The middles are wider, thicker, and are more traditional for salami making. They peel easier after curing, and combined with the MOLD600 we had little to no case hardening. If you use pork casing, check the weight loss earlier as they will dry faster.

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Salami Haywood

As always, if you’ve never cured sausage before, please check out our primer before you get started- these instructions assume a baseline knowledge of the process. These ingredients are measured by percent weight, not volume, to make them easy to scale to the amount of meat you are working with. Grind the meat you would like to use, weigh it, and then do the math to figure out how much of each of the other ingredients you will need by percentage. Do not substitute or change the ratio of instacure #2 or salt. You may adjust the spices to your liking.

A note on the persimmons- we foraged our persimmons, but store bought will work fine too. Just make sure you get the right kind- you want hachiya, not fuyu, persimmons. The fuyu are delicious on their own, but the hachiya are better suited for cooking and baking applications. Persimmons have a reputation for astringency when not fully ripe- you can avoid this by picking after a frost, or freezing them yourself for a short period of time and then letting them soften on your countertop. This brings out the sugars and decreases the tannins in the fruit.

Prep time: 1 hour

Hang time: 21-40 days

Ingredients:

100 % goose thigh/wing meat, deboned, trimmed of sinew, tendons and skin

25% pork fat

1.4% salt

.38% instacure #2

.6% dextrose

.6% fennel seed, toasted, coarsely crushed

.37% black peppercorn, toasted, coarsely crushed

1.8% elephant garlic, minced

6% pecans, shelled, roughly chopped

7% persimmon puree, bletted, seeds removed

** bactoferm f-rm-52

Method:

Combine goose meat, salt, instacure #2, dextrose, fennel, pepper, garlic and pecans. Cover and refrigerate for a few hours or overnight. 

Grind fat separately through a medium die, then grind the meat mixture through a fine die.

Using a stand mixer or wooden spoon, mix the fat with the meat mixture and incorporate the persimmon. Add the bactoferm and water mixture. Mix until slightly tacky, about 1-2 minutes.

Stuff into beef middles, tie into 10” links, and prick with a sterile needle or sausage pricker. Weigh and record the starting weight of each set of links. Incubate for ~12-18 hours in a warm room, then hang in the cure chamber for 21-40 days, or until 30-35% weight loss is achieved.

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