I'm quite certain we have the coolest balcony accessory in the street, and it's not from Ikea and doesn't involve geraniums: it's a big fuck off West End Draught esky with salami hanging inside. and it's red.
if you don't have a garage but you want to make cured meat at home this is the way to go. JG assures me that garages and salami are a recipe for disaster anyway. eskies make temperature and humidty control easier and more accurate, and the balcony gets no direct sun at the moment so it never gets too warm up there.
to make salami you need a meat mincer, some bungs (intestines for casing), meat, fat and spices for the filling, and a lot of wine. JG started making the salami quite early and was just starting a hangover by the time I got home from work (so we drank another bottle and a half to fill the bungs).
anyone who wants JG's meat and spice formula should email him, all I know is that it includes pork, garlic, salt, pepper and fennel seeds, but there's more to it than that. the basic process is to mince the lean meat to the right coarseness then mix in fat, spices and the correct amount of salt for drying and preserving. the meat needs to be kneaded by hand. meanwhile, soak the intestines in water so they soften and expand.
a very important step, and especially good after drinking all day, is testing the seasoning and flavour of the filling. fry a little bit of the mixture and taste (drink more wine) and enjoy because the bloody things hang for at least three months- this is no good for impatient people like me.
we didn't have any special equipment to fill the bungs so we used a polyurethane pastry piping bag (I'm not making profiterole until I get a new one).
after hanging for about a week, they look like this:
apparently this is normal and desirable. last night JG removed the mould with a vinegar solution and a lot of scraping (with a pastry scrape- I think I need a new one) and then cleaned the skins with olive oil and vinegar. now they're being pressed between plastic cheese racks with weights on top to press out any air pockets and excess moisture. and we wait. and wait.
while JG was scraping off the stinking grey goo (and I was trying unsuccessfully to run away from the smell and my paper-towel tearing duty) we were musing about the first people who did what we were doing- before anyone wrote about the process and said you probably won't die if you eat this. what the hell were they thinking? as with blue-mould cheeses, this surely was an unfortunate accident that happened to some peasant who was too poor or hungry to choose any other option but to scrape the mould off their old bit of salty meat or cheese and eat it anyway, and discover how good it tasted. in his excellent book One Continuous Picnic, Michael Symons highlights the contrast between the peasant influence on European eating habits and the gratuitous mass production and over-consumption in Australia, a legacy from a society which had begun industrialisation in England before relocating to the colony and discovering that you never had to worry about devising ways of using the whole animal or preserving parts for later use, you could just grow more of the bits you liked and throw away the rest. His section on the popularity of canned meat both here and in England is quite disturbing. I much prefer the idea of making stinking, mouldy, preserved things at home and taking my chances eating them later, like my peasant ancestors.
