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We've just tasted our home made salami for the first time.

We've made bacon reguarly for years but salami is a whole new thing for us.

First you have to make up the sausages and leave them in a warm place to become inoculated. You then move them to a cooler place to ferment, mature and air dry. They shrivel up in the process and lose a lot of weight.

We also smoked ours because it helps to preserve the salami and we like the smokey flavour.

Today (10 weeks in) we tasted it with a bit of home made bread and it was delicious.
It's smokey and peppery and has that distinctive salami flavour.

We're going to try venison salami next.

and very nice it looks to,im not jelous honest ,care to share your method ,i get the odd roe deer and fancy venison salami myself ,ive one in the chiller now thats destined to be turned into sausage and mince today and tomorrow ,other than the loins and fillets , but i think its to late for salami with this one as we have nothing ready .

We've just been given half a deer, so we've made some venison salami-style fermented sausage. This is how we did it. We're not pretending that we are experts. This is all an experiment.


3kg Minced Venison
1kg Cured Pork Back Fat
100g salt
1pint Scrumpy Cider
4 cloves of Garlic
1 tbsp of Cayenne Pepper
10g of pepper (roughly ground)
0.6g saltpetre
Hog Middle Sausage Casings
Some salami to use as a starter

Cut up half of the back fat into small cubes and mince the other half.
Mix the venison, backfat, cider, garlic, pepper, salt and saltpetre really well then add some of the salami and leave in a warm place for 18 hours.
Remove the salami that was added as a starter and remix the ingredients.
Feed mixture into the sausage casings enuring that there is no air inside.
Hang in a cool dry place with plenty of airflow and monitor the humidity to ensure that it is around 70% and monitor the ph of the sausage to ensure that it is below 4.5.
Hang the rest of the salami that you are using as a starter next to it.

We've used hog middles which makes a sausage more like chorizo than salami in size.

The idea of using the salami starter is to give the sausage the right kind of mould that will produce the powdery white coating that you get on salami.

If the humidity is too high you can use fans or a dehumidifier. We hang a net of charcoal in the air drying area and change it each day for one that has been dried off by being kept by the woodburner or by the underfloor heating pipes.

If the ph of the sausage goes above 4.5 you can wipe it down with vinegar and water.

The salami will take 6 to 10 weeks to mature.

On our first go at making fermented sausages we hung them from both ands to get a horseshoe shape but found that it created problems with airflow on the inside of the horseshoe shape and it did not dry evenly so this time we have hung them from one end only.

There is a lot of discussion around the use of nitrates and nitrites. We currently use saltpetre, but may change our minds about this as we get more experience of fermenting meat. We'd be interested in other peoples thoughts on this as well as any other thoughts or experience of fermenting and air-drying meat.

We may smoke the sausages after a couple of weeks of hanging to help preserve them and to give them a smokey flavour. We are particularly keen on smoked food.

thank you for that ! when you say cool place with plenty of air movement what sort of temperature are you talking about ? i have a cooler that i hang deer and game in, i think the range is somewhere in the reason of 2-8 degrees and it has fans, would that be suitable ?

Your cooler is probably going to be a bit too cool. Ideally it want to be about 15 degrees centigrade. If it is a bit cooler than that it will take longer. The place where we air dried our last lot of salami was quite a bit cooler than that but it worked ok.

We started to smoke the venison salami today so took some pictures first. It looks like this:


The smoker we're using is our old catering trailer fed with smoke by a woodburner. It looks like this:


We're smoking the salami and some bacon and ham with wild cherry shavings that we have from when we made the window ledges in our house.

Just a few more weeks to wait and then we can try it.