Lamb Prosciutto: Part III

Despite Saturday’s discombobulation, we did make forward progress on our lamb prosciutto.

When Seppi and Daddy were over in the morning we put a thermo-hygrometer in the basement to check temperature and humidity. At 60 degrees F it was the perfect temperature, although 45% humidity is a little dry. So we turned the de-humidifier off.

When we came back to the farm after lunch we pulled the legs out of the fridge and rinsed them off. Legs 1 & 3 we rinsed with (cheapo) red wine, Leg 2 we rinsed with cold water.

I will say, the Legs 1 & 2 have taken on a beautiful purple red color.

And the meat is much firmer than it was when we put it in, more on that later.

After rinsing thoroughly we patted dry. Very firmly.

There is still some light fat and silver skin attached, and with all the research I have been doing I think the butcher job on the ball end of the leg is not as clean as it could have been.

My first attempt at a continuous butcher’s wrap. Turned out rather nicely, I think. Next time I will try to get the wraps more consistently spaced.

Evie tied the 3rd leg all by herself.

With a little help.

She could manage the half hitches very nicely, but needed a little help keeping tension on the previous hitch while setting up the subsequent one.

Then, most importantly, we weighed each leg and labeled them with their starting weights.

Don’t believe the weights on the scale in the pictures, because Evie found it too hard to hold them still enough to avoid variation. Also, this scale is only accurate to 0.05 kg, roughly 1 3/4 ounces. If we figure a variation of 0.05, or +/1 0.025kg from true, it is only +/- 1.2% of the total weight of the meat. This should not seriously affect the final product, but we may invest in a more sensitive scale for the next go-round, or use the table-top digital scales.

The reason why weight matters is that aging is complete when it has lost 30% of its total weight.

Ellie scribed for us, very nicely in fact. Each leg gets a strip of painter’s tape around the string.

We set up the thermo-hygrometer to monitor conditions.

Here are the details of this experiment so far:

I need to increase the humidity to 60-70% in the basement, and recheck the meat daily for the next week. White flat mold, a la camembert is okay, anything fuzzy or any color other than white needs to be patted off with vinegar. Next Saturday I need to coat the legs with strutto, a 50:50 mix of flour and lard to slow moisture loss, and prevent hardening of the skin. Then it is a matter of weighing weekly until they reach target weight.

We are going for broke! We’ll keep you posted on how this turns out.