Summer sausage into salami????

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seadog92

Smoke Blower
Original poster
Sep 13, 2013
122
24
A week before Christmas, I made my daughter some summer sausage, packaging it in the brown collagen tubes.  She put it in the bottom of the fridge and forgot about it until yesterday.  The meat had shrunk to a bit more than half the original size.  When we sliced it, I swear it tasted like pretty good hard salami.  Now I've read salami recipes and understand the aspect of using the right cure, the fermenting agent and the aging in a controlled environment for several weeks until the moisture content has reduced by a certain percentage.  I did add powdered buttermilk to the mix, so I know there had to have been some lactic acid action.

My question is, do we have just a semi dried out summer sausage, or is this another possible way of making Salami?  It has the characteristics of a hard salami.  I thought perhaps the constant opening and closing of the fridge had done something that doesn't usually happen in aging.  Or maybe I'm just full of wishful thinking.  Any comments?
 
You did smoke/cook the summer sausage using cure #1 so what you experienced was a cooked dried out SS from the refrigeration yet you still have to me aware the possibility of bad Bactria growth inside the meat where it was softer. I dry my kabanosy sticks in the fridge after cooking for a few weeks but you have to be careful if you let them go too long they will go bad. You will get case hardening and trapped moisture and the trapped moisture is not good...... A good reference to show if you have microbial growth is a pH measurement.... The pH is a measure of the acidity or alkalinity in solutions or water containing substances. pH values lower than 7 are considered acidic, while pH values higher than 7 are considered alkaline. A pH of 7 indicates neutrality. A low pH discourages the development of undesirable micro-organisms.
 
Thank you.  To be honest, after I posted the message and thought about it, I realized that since I smoked the SS to start with, it was just a dried form.  But it sure tastes good.   Thanks for the tip on the PH.  I've been reading about making fermented sausages, and it appears that a PH meter is a good investment in safety.
 
One thing to realize too seadog is that as sausage dries down and loses it's water content, the spices become more pronounced.

What I'd like to know is if he didn't have case hardening will it go bad being in the fridge and drying out that long of a time? If it fermented and is losing water, I'd say no because after a certain water loss it would be shelf stable.  I think it's .89 Aw if I remember correctly.  

If you want to test the PH I'd recommend getting some test strips.  The Sausage Maker website sells two different ranges.  I looked into getting a PH meter but from what I've read you have to constantly calibrate and use a neutral solution as a starting point.  With the test strips, just take some meat and mince with a very little bit of distilled water.  They are fairly accurate.
 
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