It's all about to happen sometime soon...
Curing chamber now made and working.
Meat on order and ingredients sorted. Will use 10kg of shoulder pork put through the coarsest plate by my local Booker's.
Read Marianski's books (as well as a few others).
Have made some bacon just to get the feel of things and to ensure the curing chamber works.
Have some LS-25 culture in the freezer and casings in the fridge.
Chouriço day is 31 January.
Now I don't really know a huge amount about the LS-25 as it's not specifically mentioned in Marianski's book.
Anyone know where I can download a data sheet, what the optimal fermentation temperature is (I was going to start at 72hrs at 20C, 95% relative humidity).
Looking to the future was this the best culture to have chosen? Once I've build up confidence would you stay with a culture or try without?
When made in the Alentejo I'm guessing that the culture comes from a combination of the red wine that is added and the naturally fermented/salted bell pepper paste (massa de pimentão) that make up the farce.
I'm electing to use Spanish smoked pimenton because I've no way of calculating the salt content of the home-made paste that I've brought back from Portugal (on asking family how to calculate salt content in the farce they just tell me to do it by taste - but of course they have the experience, and I don't...).
Thanks
SS