Salami Sticks

If you are looking for a fairly easy and very quick way to make tasty salami try making these salami sticks. They are made with simple seasonings and are fully ready in 3 - 4 weeks. Delicious, showcasing rich porky flavor with hints of aged cheese and powerful savoriness, this sausage is great as a snack or an appetizer.

Some grocery stores in my area sell a variety of really tasty salami sticks cutely named 'Artisan Stickini' made by Salumeria Il Tagliere. They are about 1/2" thick and look like they are encased in collagen casings. The taste is slightly acidic, about 5.3 pH. The flavor profiles include olive, hot, sweet and rosemary which is quite fantastic and is my favorite of the four. The seasonings are subtle and the saltiness is nice.

The sticks are quite dry and hard, you'd say they lost about 55% of the original weight by the look and feel of it. As far as the level of dryness goes, they resemble my sujuk which I love.

Needless to say, I've been wanting to make these at home and start experimenting with creating my own flavors. So I finally did it and I must say, my salami sticks turned out quite good but there was some room for improvement next time.

Ingredients for salami sticks

I am more than comfortable making regular size salami but how do you make salami sticks? Since they will dry lightning-speed quickly, do you need to use a starter culture and Cure #2? Will nitrates have enough time to convert to nitrites? Perhaps I should use Cure #1? Unfortunately, I could not find answers in the literature nor did I find any reputable online resources on this. I don't even recall ever seeing any traditional Italian salami of this caliber. Michael Ruhlman in his Charcuterie book specifies 2-3 weeks drying time for dry-cured sausages such as soppressata and chorizo but I found a lot of inaccuracies in his books so I would take his recipes with a grain of salt.

If I were pressed to do it, I'd use a starter culture and Cure #2 without a doubt. Luckily, the ingredient list on the Artisan Stickini package confirmed it for me - it listed a starter culture, nitrates and nitrites. Aren't these guys amazing? I trust that these guys did their research and surely followed federal standards so I am on the right track.

To summarize, to make salami sticks, I am going to use the usual suspects: pork/fat, salt, Cure#2, starter culture, dextrose/sugar, spices and seasonings.

For my first batch of salami sticks, I went with a simple tried-and-true seasoning mix used by many Italian artisan salumi makers: salt, pepper, and garlic-infused red wine. In the future, I will be experimenting with other flavors.

Casings

I am not a big fan of collagen casings for salumi so I decided to go with sheep casings for this sausage. Looking at the store-bought sausages, collagen casings seem to work quite well here. I will try them in one of my next batches.

Fermentation and drying

By virtue of being so thin, salami sticks lose a lot of water during the first few days. I ended up using approximately the following fermentation/drying schedule:

I would normally raise the humidity in my curing chamber in step 5 of drying but I noticed that the sausages got a little sticky which indicated to me that water wasn't being removed as quickly as it should have been so I dropped the humidity back down and kept it there until the end of the drying cycle.

Let me explain the schedule a little. When I say, for example, RH is 70-75%, what I do is I run humidity at 70% for 12 hours then 75% for 2 hours. Then repeat the cycle.

This lets the sausage rehydrate the skin and prevent case hardening. Is this necessary? This is how Italian commercial salumi curing chambers like Staginonello operate. I suppose there are good evidence-based reasons behind it. At home, I replicate this with my programmable Auber HD220-W humidity controller.

If you don't have a programmable controller, simply set a wider RH range and let the humidity fluctuate within it. There isn't one way to do it but the goal is to always run your chamber such that water coming up to the surface of the sausage leaves the surface at the same rate. Stickiness, bad smell, case hardening are signs of water evaporating too slowly or too quickly.

Maturing

When it was time for maturing, I started off with 55-57F and 73-78% RH range but again had to drop the humidity to 70-73% range as the surface of the salami sticks felt a touch sticky. About 12 hours later the surface dried up, the skin felt soft and hydrated but not sticky. After that, I gradually raised to humidity to 73-75% range where it stayed most of the rest of the time.

Total time

The total time for fermentation, drying and maturing was 21 days. I typically let thicker salami dry cure for at least 28 days but 21 days will do as destruction of trichinella in dry-cured traditional salami with salt concentration of at least 2.75% is about 19 days. I know, the risk of contracting Trichinellosis from pork nowadays is practically zero and the few cases we see each year come from ingesting undercooked wild game meat, but still. Longer drying times typically correlate with greater (but never complete) deactivation of pathogenic bacteria that may be present in meat, though I haven't seen any studies on very thin salami that dry to 55% weight loss in three weeks and end up with very low water activity very quickly. Such fast drying is no doubt a huge safety hurdle, helping prevent the growth of potentially harmful bacteria.

A longer maturing time results in better flavor development so even though my salami sticks lost 44% of weight by week two and 55% by week three, I will give them another week in the curing chamber.

Weight loss

As I mentioned above, my salami sticks lost about 44% of weight after two weeks and 54-55% after three weeks.  The surface felt well-hydrated but without stickiness. I did not inoculate the sausages with white mold so there was only a faint layer of mold on the surface that developed naturally.

At 44% weight loss, the sausages felt quite firm but much softer than the store-bought stickini. The texture felt uniformly firm, not even a small sign of case-hardening, but it was much softer compared to the store-bought stickini. There definitely was room for more drying.

At 55% weight loss my salami sticks were very firm but still not quite as hard as the stickini. I felt like 55% weight loss was sufficient but there was nothing wrong with drying them a little more and seeing how they'd stack up against the stickini. Mind you, the stickini are quite hard but I love them so I am sure I will like harder salami sticks. Some of my family members strongly prefer the harder texture of the stickini. So, there you have it. I will give them another week and see how they fare.

Taste notes

My salami sticks were made with meat trimmings left from curing a big batch of solid muscles back in December. This resulted in the fat level being higher than usual, I'd say about 35%, maybe more. A little too fatty for my taste. Next time I will limit the amount of fat to 20-25% tops.

I also felt that the fat ground through a 1/4" (6mm) was a little too big for this sausage type so next time I will go with a 3/16" (4.5mm) grinder plate and re-evaluate.

Tastewise, the sausage was very good. Salt and acidity levels were practically identical with the store-bought. That's a good thing as I liked the store-bough sticks a lot. My salami sticks lacked rosemary flavor, unsurprisingly, so I will be adding it next time, I'll start with 1%.

Now, what do you think was the biggest and quite significant difference between the store-bought and homemade salami sticks? It's the flavor. When eating the store-bought salami sticks, I thought that they were quite tasty. When I compared them side by side with my homemade salami sticks I immediately noticed how much they lacked in the flavor department. There was a huge difference. The homemade stick had that rich porky flavor with hints of aged cheese and powerful savoriness. The stickini tasted good but had no depth, no umami, no savoriness. Bland comes to mind. I was astonished. Judging by the lack of mold on stickini, they were dried/cured quickly and possibly at low temps a-la Umai bag drying in a fridge without any fermentation whatsoever. If that's the case, I foresee my upcoming Umai experiment to be a disappointment.

Oh, enjoy these salami sticks with the skin peeled off otherwise they will have a very strong cellar/earthy flavor. I always remove the skin from my salumi but this time I felt like, hey, it's just thin sticks, I'll just eat them with the skin on. Big mistake. I didn't like it much. The skin peels off easily but if not, wet it under running water, dry and it will come right off.

Options

Another variation that came to mind was to make this salami with a fast-fermenting culture such as F-RM-52 I use to make Ruhlman's soppressata. Not that I particularly like this starter culture, but it's designed for fast fermenting sausages and you can use less salt with it, as low as 2.5%. I will be trying that also in of my new batches.

Overall, I am very happy with these salami sticks and foresee making them quite often in the future.

Salami Sticks

5 from 3 votes

Print Pin Rate

Course: Appetizer, Sausage

Cuisine: Italian

Keyword: salami sticks

Prep Time: 2 hours hours

Dry-curing time: 21 days days

Total Time: 21 days days 2 hours hours

Servings: 18 6" sticks

Calories: 141kcal

Author: Victor

Ingredients

• 800 g lean pork any or a combination of lean ham, shoulder, neck (coppa), or loin
• 200 g pork back fat or fatty pork belly
• 25.5 g sea salt
• 2.5 g cure #2
• 1/2 clove garlic crushed, for infusing wine only, removed after infusion
• 30 ml dry red wine
• 1 g black pepper
• 0.2 g T-SPX culture
• 2.5 g sugar
• 60 ml water

Instructions

• Crush the garlic and place it in a small cup. Add the wine and let it infuse for at least 30 minutes and up to 2 hours. Strain the wine before mixing it with the meat.
• Rehydrate the starter culture in 60 ml distilled water for about 30 minutes to an hour.
• Weigh the lean meat and the back fat in grams. Calculate the rest of the ingredients.
• Cut the meat into 2" pieces and freeze for 20 minutes. Grind the meat through a 1/4" (6 mm) grinder plate and fat through a 3/16" (4.5mm) grinder plate.
• In a small bowl, combine salt, pepper, Cure #2 and sugar.
• Combine the lean pork with the seasonings, sugar, wine, and rehydrated starter culture. Mix well, until sticky, then mix in the groud back fat.
• Stuff into natural sheep casings and tie into 18-inch (45cm) links.
• Using a sterilized needle or sausage pricker, prick holes across the entire salami.
• Weigh the salami, write down its weight on a tag and attach the tag to the salami. You can do just a couple, no need to do each one.
• If desired, inoculate with mold.
• Ferment then dry at 59F - 73F (15C - 25C) and 65% - 86% RH for a period of 7 days as per the drying protocol in the notes, also explained in detail in the post.
• Mature in the curing chamber at 55F - 57F (13C - 14C) and 73-75% RH for about 3 -4 weeks. Read the post above for more details.

Notes

Fermentation/drying schedule. Refer to the post above for more details on this.

Stage	Duration	Temp	RH
Fermentation	8 hours	73F (25C)	< 99 %
Drying	12 hours	71F (23C)	75-85 %
Drying	24 hours	69F (22C)	68-78 %
Drying	24 hours	67F (20C)	65-75 %
Drying	24 hours	64F (18C)	68-78 %
Drying	24 hours	61F (16C)	68-73 %
Drying	24 hours	59F (15C)	70-75 %

The seasonings in the recipe are super simple but they work very well. That said, feel free to experiment. As I mentioned above, I really liked the rosemary-flavored salami sticks so that will be my next flavor to try. I'd start with 1% and go from there.

Nutrition

Calories: 141kcal | Carbohydrates: 1g | Protein: 10g | Fat: 11g | Saturated Fat: 4g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g | Monounsaturated Fat: 5g | Trans Fat: 1g | Cholesterol: 35mg | Sodium: 628mg | Potassium: 186mg | Fiber: 1g | Sugar: 1g | Vitamin A: 2IU | Vitamin C: 1mg | Calcium: 3mg | Iron: 1mg