A couple of years ago, I made some Italian Sausage and Breakfast Sausage which was pretty straight forward since you only needed to add the spices to the ground meat. But wondered about how to make corned beef and pastrami. Of course I Googled how to make corned beef. It was very easy to make and it did taste great. To make pastrami, the next step would be to smoke your home made corned beef. Additionally, after buying a whole brisket to make the corned beef, I did trim it and rendered the fat into tallow which is great for frying potatoes and the rest of the trimmed meat was used for canned beef roast with potatoes, onions and carrots.
About a year after doing that, we went on our first safari in Africa and had the opportunity to taste the South African version of jerky called Biltong. I really enjoued it and wanted to be able to make some when I got home.
As with the corned beef, I Googled how to make Biltong and found a great site, Two Guys and a Cooler. Since I prefer seeing to just reading, I quickly switched over to their YouTube videow and followed his instructions and made a batch of Biltong. Of course, I didn’t have all of that African wild game to work with but I could buy pork loin or beef sirloin, so I made Biltong from a pork loin.
It tasted great and the pork loin was only about $2 per pound for a 10 pound loin. I used 1/3 of the pork loin for thick loin chops that we could fill with cornbread and the other 1/3 was ground up for more Italian sausage. I canned the sausage so that it was in a shelf stable form to keep it in the pantry.
It was way cheaper to buy pork loin than beef sirloin when you are learning how to make something new. After making the Biltong, I looked at his other recipes that made use of the pork loin. I made Spanish Lomo which was great. I also made Teryaki Lomo which uses Teryaki Sauce as part of the salt for curing the meat. The Spanish Lomo and the Teryaki Lomo were great.
It was time to venture into other cured whole muscle meats. I point that out because when curing whole muscle meat rather than ground meat, you don’t have to use a curing salt, but just regular pickling or kosher salt.
With making lomo and biltong under my belt, it was time to create the whole meat and cheese tray. I had to learn how to make cheese other than just Paneer cheese, farmers cheese, Mozzarella or ricotta cheese which I had already made before.
Check out my cheese adventures here.
As I moved towards making cheese, I didn’t abandon my desire to try to cure other cuts of meat. I made Braciola and Copa from a pork butt and am looking forward to making bacon, ham, panchetta, basturma, proscuitto, Serrano ham and other cured meats.
Once you start watching Two Guys and a Cooler’s YouTube videos, you will be curing meat in no time at all.