I have not done any dried sausage before now, so I received a copy of Michael Ruhlman's "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing" for Xmas. A nice read it is, with some fairly tasty-looking recipes in it. However, as I was looking through the section on dried sausage, I saw that when the recipe called for Bactoferm culture it called for a lot. Typically, up to 20 grams of culture, dissolved in 60 ml of distilled water, for a 5 lb recipe. That seems to be unusually high, considering that Len Poli seems to use less than a gram of culture in his meats, and Butcher & Packer's website says that 25 grams of culture is enough for 220 lb of meat. (http://www.butcher-packer.com/newsarticle.asp?id=36) What are your thoughts? Is this wrong, and if so, should the author be notified? Or is it just irrelevant?
BTW, I can post a couple of recipes if you want, though I have yet to try anything from the book.