Hello!
This is my third project in my curing chamber, and my first long project. My curing chamber is a standard height fridge with a humidifier, dehumidifier, and two controllers two control both the humidity and the temperature. I do not have a heat source and i do not exchange air from inside the fridge with the outside. The controllers are set to 80% RH ±5% and 13°C ±0.8°C.
Earlier i have made beer sticks three times in my curing chamber, all with good results (https://i.imgur.com/qiQOe5q.jpg), but they are done curing after about 10 days and this salami was expected to cure for between two to three months, and it looks like three months is what it is going to be.
I used this recipe:
The recipe said to both cold smoke and treat with mold which felt a bit redundant since from what i’ve read mold is not likely to grow on something that has been smoked, so i cold smoked only one of the salamis but treated both with mold anyways. I could not find a Swedish seller offering Bactoferm mold 600, but my local supplier for things like this had M-CULTURE OR 15 which is another white mold culture, so i used that instead.
This cold smoked salami has showed zero mold growth while the one i did not smoke showed some mold growth, and i figured that since the white mold refused to spread during the first two months, other molds would too. Today when i inspected it closer i saw that a few small patches of other molds had begun to grow on the salami that i had not cold smoked, so i wiped the salami down with vinegar. Is that an ok solution for this project or is that salami better wasted? I should have reapplied the white mold culture when it spread unevenly, but i was (still am) unexperienced.
Drying has also significantly slowed down, i was going to with until it reached about 36-40% weight loss but with as slow as it is right now (2% weight loss during the last 10 days) the plan is now to let them decrease below 34% weight loss then open them and see how they turned out.
Opinions on the images and the project in general is appreciated, especially in what i could possibly improve.
Here are some pictures: https://imgur.com/a/WKsa2Ih
Thank you for reading this far! 🙂
by JakeArmitage