Cured game meat

It all depends on what the wild game has been eating. This also means as you know, wild game can vary in flavor greatly! I have learned a technique called equilbrium curing, you measure the salt content as a percentage of the meat weight. By doing this, you can get precision curing, and choose the salt level. Cutting thinly this stuff is delicious. I have a selection of options. The hind leg prime muscles offer a lot of options. Once all the sinew is cleaned up unless you are freezing the muscle, then the sinew can help protect in the meat when frozen.

This is the setup I use:. If you want more info on dry curing in a normal fridge, I wrote a whole guide on it here. I use the equilibrium curing method, which is curing by a percentage of salt in relation to the weight of the meat you are curing. It means you get an accurate saltiness and you can choose how much salt you prefer based on your taste. The Italians created a delicious dry cured beef recipe using the eye of round from the cow.

This kind of meat is extremely lean and solid meat, which made me think it would be similar to a lot of the wild red meat that I harvest. I have used this style for many different cuts and shapes sometimes chopping up the whole muscle more, especially for quicker dry cured meat session in my regular kitchen fridge. Curing with a wet brine, I found best since it helps retain the moisture in the bird. A wild turkey is something I love to hot smoke. But the brining just helps with mositure and the subtle flavors seems to come through also.

For longer smoking sessions, which helps get more smoke flavor in. Sometimes I will use a kettle grill, doing the indirect heat snake method. This is a kind of the ultimate hunting snack, I use the South African style biltong the base classic recipe is salt, malt vinegar, and toasted coriander.

I like to add smoked paprika, chilli, and sometimes a few juniper berries classic pairing with red game meat. I have done biltong and jerky in oven or a dehydrator. But once I got my DIY curing chamber I like to slow down the drying process and do it over through two or three days. Before breaking down the method in more detail, I just wanted to go over each component and the equipment. A curing chamber is not essential and I have written about what you need to build your own with an old fridge or wine fridge.

If you want to read more about this, you can get the guide in my charcuterie course too. It really just depends on the humidity. You can just buy a hygrometer gauge if you want to find out accurately what level you have around home. Especially if you are starting off with projects in your normal kitchen fridge. The salt box method can always be a bit hit and miss.

Due to the variations in the meat cuts and how much you roll around the meat in the salt. Then you are coating the meat and rolling it around in the mixture. The salt box method is covering the whole meat with salt and leaving it for a certain amount of days based on the weight.

Traditional whole cured prosciutto hams of Italy, you can see the shape from the pressure applied during the curing process. I have no idea when the equilibrium curing process came out. I first read about it on the cured meat blog site mentioned. Although I do tend to use less when curing pork belly for pancetta sometimes 1. This percentage of salt does not include the curing salt.

From what I have found you want to use under g of weight for fridge curing projects with an unmodified regular fridge. I experienced this when I tried to have a nice pork loin with a decent fat streak, I tried to cure it in my normal kitchen fridge with some other cured recipes I was doing, including a Hungarian smoked paprika pork loin, Spanish Chorizo style and Beef, Juniper.

I ended up having to start up the big curing chamber and it took an extra three weeks to my surprise. The other beef and pork cuts were ready in days in the normal kitchen fridge. I think this is a step in itself because using sodium nitrates and nitrites you should be careful with. Simple step, I like to put some weight on my regular fridge projects to help shape and get the salt to penetrate through the meat. When you use a Ziploc bag, I find the best technique is to really squeeze all the air out and leave one part of the Ziploc open so that pretty much all that air gets squeezed out before zipping shut.

This is the basic method that has been used for a very long time. For larger meat projects in a curing chamber. If you were using salt box for regular fridge curing, you can leave the meat in a salt cure for say 24 hours, but you may find the final product to be to salty in my experience. Duck prosciutto is used for hour salt-curing for instance.

For equilibrium curing, I have found that less than g of weight will work best in a normal fridge, it should only take about 4 to 7 days. The meat will be fully cured. Then you rinse off the cure and you can rinse off most of the spices too. I have yet to try this, I prefer my wine consumed orally. Now would be the time if you want to add another layer of flavor on the outside, you can do this by making a spice blend. Black pepper crushed at this point also can help the antibacterial side of it because it has antibacterial properties.

Once you get the current weight just multiply this by 0. Now I just use a little cut piece of cardboard, but you can use a label printer or anything that you put a hole through.

Then record what it is and the finished weight date is also optional. You just tie this on over the muslin if you are wrapping it. So I put this in is an optional step because it does depend on the project.

Most of time I do a normal fridge dry-cure project, I will use muslin. I have found the pork and beef come out a lot better if I wrap the meat. It seems to just help hold in the moisture and not dry out as much. It also is quite aesthetically pleasing to look at if you tie it uniformly.

There are also many types of casings and bungs, which are intestines or stomachs of animals that work really well as well. But the temperature is cool enough to prevent any bad bacteria so short-term dry-cured meat creation can be done. I would recommend that you check out the humidity, so you know roughly what it does. Organic Cheeses. Unpasteurized Cheeses. Eastern Europe. United Kingdom. All States. Middle East. Extra Virgin Olive Oils. Specialty Oils.

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