Do you want 600 mold on hanging flat pancetta? Or No?

[sea2ski]

My wife wants me to make pancetta. I have made bacon and love it. Now we want to make it into pancetta. So I have a 1/2 belly curing at 3.25% salt with .25% cure #1 (I did not use cure 2 because I am not going to roll it, and I did not know how long it will take to dry.) My goal is to dry it hanging ‘flat’in the curing chamber. @~50F and 80% humidity to 32-35% weight loss.

My question - I have other meat hanging which was inoculated with bacteriform 600 and they are covered with mold. I suppose that the mold will spread to the hanging flat pancetta fairly quickly. Is that good? Or do you not want mold on flat pancetta?

Thoughts?

 

[pc farmer]

The mold wont hurt it. I would have used #2 thou.

 

[atomicsmoke]

No worries about the mold.

What do you plan to do with the pancetta? Eat as cold cut?

 

[sea2ski]

Thanks guys.
I did not use #2 because of the duration of the dry time. Would it be long enough for the Nitrates to break down to nitrites? I do not know. So I went with cure 1 for some more protection. Better than not using anything as far as I know.

We are going to use it for a bit of both cooking and trying to eat it as part of a charcuterie board and see if we like it. Once hitting 32’ish % weight loss, I plan on doing a rise with vinegar to stun/ wipe off the mold, then a fast follow up rinse with white wine. I then plan to air dry for a couple hours to dry the surface again.

I did not know if the mold in the curing chamber would give a negative tase to flat pancetta with the surface area to volume ratio since it is different than a larger salumi.

Just trying something new to us, but thought I would ask those who have done this. Learn from others mistakes instead of my own puts us that much further ahead, right?