Coppa (calabrese) May 2012

We found a local butcher shop that butchers pigs from farms around Pittsburgh. The pigs are hormone and steroid free. In addition, they are butchered every Friday and the meat is sold on Mondays, that’s as fresh as you can get. The butcher showed us how to harvest the coppa cut (pork collar) from the shoulder. Since we had a nice coppa from a shoulder butt we were using for hot sausage we decided to make a coppa.

Pepperoni Tasting

We experienced a few problems with the knew curing chamber we used to make the pepperoni.  We had a hard time at first controlling the humidity.  The humidity ran pretty high for awhile over 90%.  We added a Heat tube made for gun safes, which help cycle the refrigerator which lowered the humidity.  

As for the taste it was nothing close to the commercial pepperoni, there was no tangy taste and the spice was mild.  The chamber had a slight chemical smell, which did affect the pepperoni slightly.  We are unsure if it was because of the small area and the deep mold coverage we got from the Bactoferm.  So to conclude we probably would not use the same recipe and will probably look to make a more American version and cook the product. This was a small project to test the drying process. We feel the chamber did dry the pepperoni really good.