A cure for the Daring Cooks

Our Daring Cooks challenge for the months of January and February was to make fresh or cured sausage or salumi.  This was a perfectly timed challenge as we had just purchased the book that inspired it:  Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn and have been fervently paging through the book trying to decide which of the recipes to try first.

Salumi is the generic Italian term for cured meats and includes Salami (salame is the plural here) and also whole-muscle cures such as pancetta, prosciutto and capicola. The challenge also offered the option to make sausage, either fresh or cured.

Talk about spoiled for choice! We wanted to try our hands at all kinds of sausage and cured meats, so for this challenge we made cured pork shoulder, aka Spalla, smoked Andouille sausage and mortadella. We have really been bitten by the home curing bug…

For the January-February 2013 Daring Cooks’ Challenge, Carol, one of our talented non-blogging members and Jenni, one of our talented bloggers who writes The Gingered Whisk, have challenged us to make homemade sausage and/or cured, dried meats in celebration of the release of the book Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn! We were given two months for this challenge and the opportunity to make delicious Salumi in our own kitchens!