Pistachio and Lemon Salami

[indaswamp]

I also lowered the RH% by 2% to dry the chamber out a little and dry the casings a little. I'll get a humidity jump when I add the Vicentina tomorrow night.

 

[indaswamp]

I'm may have to toss the pistachio and lemon salami. Seems I may have a failed fermentation with this batch. It is probably due to operator error. I always save some of the mince left in the stuffer to wrap in cling wrap for a pH tester piece. Well, I stuffed the 3 salamis and had a little room left in the last one so I made some golf ball sized meatballs and filled the last one as to not waste any casing. Well that left my with one golf ball sized piece of mince left, which I wrapped and put into the fermentation chamber with the chubs. The salamis, having 3" dia. took longer to warm up to fermentation temp. than the small sample piece. So when the sample piece had achieved pH5.19, The salamis were not finished fermenting when I moved them to the chamber. It has been 12 days and I checked one of the salamis...pH is 5.6...not good.

The color looks good, they do not smell bad, but with 10.5% water loss already, the salt in water concentration within the salami is rising and if the bacteria don't start dropping the pH soon the salt level will be too high for them to create acid effectively and they will go dormant.

Lesson learned... I am still working out my practices for making salamis and will make a note on the extended lag times for larger dia. salamis. I will be sure to have an equal size test ball to better mirror the fermentation pH inside the salamis when testing.

Back to the drawing board....or butcher rather to buy more pork. I will also be picking up some KCL pH probe tip solution and change that out.

 

[indaswamp]

So, I changed out the KCL probe tip solution and soaked the tip for about an hour. While at the brewery store, I picked up some fresh 4.01 and 7.01 calibration solution. Recalibrated the unit, then retest the salami. pH is 5.42 still a little high, but much better than 5.6! I feel a little better about it...going to let it ride and recheck the pH in a week, see where it's at.

 

[indaswamp]

After conversations with people way more knowledgeable than me, I rechecked the pH tonight after recalibrating my Milwaukee pH meter with new calibration solutions. the pistachio and Lemon salami pH is now down to 5.33. whew! I feel a whole lot better about them now. Fermentation likely continued after transfer to lower temps. consuming available sugars but at a much slower rate. I will keep monitoring them, but the look great. Great color formation. I'll bet the flavor forming bacteria had a lot of time to do their thing....