welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen
i've got these uh these dry ager
cabinets that i'm just trying to
fill up um and in the fridge i've got a
few things that are
curing salt curing before i put them
into the dry ager
and i'm thinking of all the different
things that i can do and there's all of
these great
traditional recipes out there for
chicuteries and salamis
dried sausages fermented sausages
but i thought let's just do something
right out of left field and i thought
what if i took all the flavors i like in
a big beef chili
salt cured them on this piece of beef
and then dry aged it
let's see what'll happen so let's build
the cure in here i have
salt this is prague powder number two or
pink salt number two even though it's
white
make sure you get number two this is
black pepper mexican
oregano this is
straight up cocoa powder
this is cayenne
and paprika and over here in this little
mortar and pestle i'm going to put
some cumin and
coriander seed and i'm just going to
crush those up
and so this is a total experiment i have
no idea
if the flavors are going to work out
well in this mixture
i don't know if i'm going over with some
and under with others
uh six to eight weeks from now i guess
we'll find out
so i'm going to mix this up so all of
the ingredients are in the description
box
below and they're based off the weight
of the meat as a percentage so you find
out the weight of the meat
and then you can figure out how much
salt and cure to use
as well as the other spices and doing it
by weight means that you can be super
accurate with the amount of
salt and curing salt that you use which
means it's going to be safe
and it also means that you're not going
to go over and make something that is so
completely over salted that you need to
soak it later to get some of that salt
out
this measured dry cure approach means
that you're going to be able to
do things accurately it's going to be
reproducible
you're going to know where you went
wrong if you made a mistake because you
can go back and really take a look at it
and it also ensures safety which when
you're doing something like this you
want to make sure that you're safe
so this is going to cure in the fridge
for quite some time
so i'm going to put it into this vacuum
sealed bag
and all of this cure goes in as well
okay into the vacuum sealer
and this will go into the fridge for
10-12 days
and every once in a while i'll pull it
out and i'll just give it a little bit
of a massage to make sure that all of
this
gets everywhere over the beef and in a
couple of seconds it'll be two weeks
from now
okay our little piece of chili beef has
been vacuum sealed and
curing in the refrigerator for two weeks
now 14 days
i'm going to cut this open and get it
out here onto the tray
oh that smells wonderful so you can see
that it's fully cured i just need to
rinse some of this cure off before we
move to the next operation
okay all rinsed off next step is to wrap
it in some cheesecloth
and traditionally this would be done to
keep the bugs off
is what i've been told it also slows
down the drying process a little bit
gets you a more even drying who knows
let's just stick with tradition and see
what happens
so wrap this up and then once you get it
wrapped up
you need to truss it or tie it just with
some butcher twine and if you've watched
me do this in other videos you know that
um
i i don't do a really good job of this
i don't have enough practice so do your
best
maybe watch one of the real experts do
it and see if you can figure out what
they're doing because often they do it
so fast
that you can't see i've got one string
going this way
now the next string goes this way
and we tie it up tight again now
you want to tie it around so
i make a loop like that
and then i do it one more time
bring it under
and then tie it off tight then you do
another loop
and you just keep doing the same thing
every inch or inch and a half
okay i record the weight that it is
right now on this tag along with the
date
and also what i expect it to weigh when
it's done
curing we want this to lose 30 35
percent of its weight
before it's safe to eat and i attach
this tag
to it and then we go to the dry ager
so i've got the small dry edger set up
to 12 degrees celsius and 80
humidity i'm going to hang it up in here
and i'm going to come back maybe once a
week and check the weight
i don't think this one is going to take
very long it's a fairly
small cut so i'll see you back here when
it's done
now this piece of chili beef has been in
the dry ager for about a month and
you'll notice i've moved it down to the
brewery it was just getting so busy out
in the studio i put it down here
i weighed this up yesterday and it has
reached our
target weight so let's go back to the
studio unwrap it and cut it up
okay here is the chili beef now
this is the first run-through of doing
these whole meats dry cured like this
i did three at the same time on the same
day and all the information that i had
told me to wrap it in cheesecloth i
wouldn't do that again i think i would
just tie them up with the twine so that
i can keep the shape and have something
to hang them in the
dry ager but i definitely would not put
the
put the cheese cloth on the outside
again so let me get this
pulled apart and see what we've got
inside
okay so i rinsed this off under the sink
it had a light layer of white mold
not a lot of white mold actually there
was no green mold and no black mold
black mold is definitely something that
you don't want to see
green mold the jury's out some people
say that it's fine you just scrape it
off other people say no
you shouldn't see it at all i'm
somewhere in the middle because i've had
some
great charcuterie that had green mold on
it
so i'm not really sure i'm still
exploring i'm still learning
do a lot of reading on it if you want to
do this at home so
let's slice this open and see what
happened okay
let's slice right into the middle here
and see what we've got oh that looks
pretty good
smells really good too now i suppose
some of this really tough layer on the
outside you could cut that off with a
knife if you wanted to
i'm just going to slice it up on the
slicer and i'm going to get julie out
here
and we'll give it a taste
hey glenn hey jens i didn't want to
sneak up there you know
okay very careful is
so yes be very careful with this it's
like that
um alberta safety video that i did years
ago wasn't that horrible
and yet important it was very important
yeah
i did a i did an alberta health and
safety thing about a meat slice it was a
very funny little bit
um maybe i'll show it to you sometime so
this is
i'm just calling it chili beef okay i
had a piece of meat
i didn't know what i was going to do
with it so i took all of the flavors
that i like from chili
okay and i put them on the outside and
then up downstairs so
take a little piece and we'll see if the
flavor's
no chili flavor oh a little bit of chili
flavor
very dried beefy flavor yeah
yeah there's definitely a flavor that's
coming through
but i can't quite put my finger on it be
really good in a sandwich
or our charcuterie plate yes
yes i mean as much as i have my thinking
face on it's because i'm trying to to
identify the flavors
throw that down with some mustard and
some pickles and and things like that
it'll be really good okay so
chili beef kind of a winner um doesn't
have the flavor that i thought it was
going to have
but it's still nonetheless i think a it
was a pretty decent slice for me for a
first attempt
yeah so as much as i think i need to do
the classics
it's really a whole lot of fun just to
try things that you don't know as long
as you get the salt and the
and the curing powder right yes you can
add any flavor that you want
it is the make it your own kind of part
the recipe part of what we're doing
right here's the basic idea of how you
have to do it
but try it out test things out yeah nail
the salt nail the frog powder which i
think we've done because it's not overly
salty
and then put whatever flavor on top so i
think that's you know i'm gonna do the
classics come on back and see the
classics but i'm gonna i'm just gonna
play around with this sort of thing
sounded super fun thanks for stopping by
see you again soon
you