Red Square Salami

Cured for flavor and longevity

Curing is an ancient process that makes meat safe by keeping it inhospitable to the microbes that would otherwise cause rot. Most commonly, this is done by salting, smoking, and drying. When cured slowly and traditionally, these techniques not only make the meat safe to keep, they also make it extra delicious. Salami will last for weeks or even months if stored correctly and unsliced.

We don’t necessarily ship salami with ice packs. Since it’s cured, it’s healthy and happy at warm temperatures. To prolong its life at home keep it refrigerated. But hours or even days at warmer temperatures won’t harm it a bit.

You can’t have a salami without mold

Downy white mold is as essential to salami flavor as blue mold is for blue cheese. Every good salami has mold on it at some point in its life. It’s a sign the salami is aging well; the mold protects the fat from going rancid. If you’re buying one without mold it was probably washed off at some point. It’s edible, but you can also wash it off with a bit of vinegar and water if you’d like. If a little mold returns in time it’s a good sign.

Sliced to order

A whole salami keeps its integrity. It stays moist and sweet. As soon as you slice a bit off the air starts to change the flavor. We ship all of our salamis whole so the flavor stays intact. Slicing them is easy. Don’t worry about slicing thin pieces. Many salami lovers think a little thicker is better.

Don’t be mislead by visible fat

Just because you see more fat in one salami than another doesn’t mean it has a higher fat content. It often means it was ground a little more coarsely. Most good salamis are about 1/3 fat, give or take.

Smaller is bigger

Smaller salamis usually have more intense flavors. In a similar way to wine, where petite grapes have a higher skin to fruit ratio and therefore more tannins, small salamis have more rind to meat ratio, therefore the rind molds have a greater effect on flavor. Smaller salamis also expel moisture faster which intensifies their flavor.

Use your senses

A good salami has a short ingredient list with no corn syrup. It is glowing pink on the inside, but not too red (in which case it might be artificially colored). It has a sweet, porky smell with clean flavors and no chemically, powdered garlic aftertaste or sourness which is a telltale sign of a bad cure.

Like with most traditional foods, if you serve salami at room temperature you’ll get a lot more flavor than if it’s eaten cold, just out of the refrigerator.

A decade ago, the only way to eat good salami in the US was to smuggle it in from Europe. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Practically no one was making traditional salami in the US. How times have changed! In the last few years suddenly it seems like there’s a new salami maker popping up every other week.

It’s not a coincidence that the rise in American salami coincides with the growing interest in eating better meat and the rise of whole animal butchery. Using the whole animal means not discarding the fat and trimmings—and the traditional way to use them is to turn them into salami.

New traditions, old techniques.

In Europe, many of the best salamis are made by masters who have been curing meat most of their lives. To become a salami maker, you apprentice with a master for years or decades. Eventually, when the master is ready to retire, you take over the business. In the US, since we don’t have venerable old salami makers to apprentice under, the new crop of American salami makers are largely self-taught. They might reach out to an expert or go to Europe to work a brief stint with a butcher, but for the most part, they learned to make salami by reading books or watching videos and then tinkering until they come up with a recipe they really like.

But while they’re creating new salamis, they’re not inventing new techniques. The best new American salamis start with really good meat, which more times than not means heritage-breed pork raised on pasture without any hormones or antibiotics. The only other ingredients they add are simple and pronounceable, like garlic, wine, or sea salt. They encase the salamis in natural casings that grow patchy white mold on the outside (an essential part of the maturing process that protects the fat in the salami from going rancid while it cures). And they cure the salamis for weeks or months until they reach their peak of flavor.

Selecting and serving superior salami.

Not all of the salami made in the states these days is great. Some of them are overly spiced so you can’t taste the pork, or too small so they dry out quickly and get tough. But the good ones are really, really good—I’d even say that the best ones rival the best salamis made in Europe. When choosing a salami, look for one with a glowing pink color, a sweet, porky aroma, clean flavors without any sourness, and a pleasant texture that’s not too tough or too soft. Serve it at room temperature to get the maximum flavor. Eat the casing or not—your choice. Slice it yourself as you’re eating, that way it dries out less, and try some cut on the thicker side so you can really taste the pork.

People have been curing meats for millennia. For most of that time, no one understood the chemistry behind the process. But for centuries before refrigeration was invented, even if folks didn’t know why curing worked, they knew that once it was done—a process that could take a few weeks to a few years, depending on the size of the cut and the style of curing—the cured meats would keep for months on end. In the 20th century, amid the discovery of vitamins and preservatives and all sorts of food technology advances, scientists figured out the principles that made cured meats possible. In the process, they found shortcuts—and later on, other scientists discovered that maybe those shortcuts weren’t so great after all.

Here’s a summary of how it all works in a brief voyage through high school chemistry

(With apologies to mad scientists if I get any of the specifics incorrect.)

To make a salami, sodium nitrate, NaNO₃ is added to the meat and seasonings before they’re stuffed into the mostly air-proof casing. Inside, the bacteria and microbial organisms live in an anaerobic environment—no oxygen.

Their activity sucks one of the three oxygen molecules away, turning sodium nitrate into sodium nitrite, NaNO₂. Sodium nitrite is unstable and aggressive to microbes. It’s the compound that does the real work of curing, making the salami safe for us to eat.

While it does its job, the sodium and another oxygen molecule is leeched off. What’s left is nitric oxide, NO. This fixes the pigment color, keeping salami red. This molecule is safe.

Even though we started the cure with NaNO₃ (sodium nitrate) we ended up with NO (nitric oxide). A salami maker may add 150 parts per million of sodium nitrate to start the cure, but only 2 or 3 PPM are left. The traditional thirty day curing process eliminates the substance.

So if cured salami doesn’t have any sodium nitrate or nitrite left, why are people concerned about it?

While traditionally cured meat doesn’t have any sodium nitrate/nitrite, non-traditionally cured meat may. During the middle of the last century, in between inventing Twinkies and Cheez Whiz, food scientists deciphered the chemistry that I just described. The scientists correctly identified sodium nitrite (NaNO₂) as the money molecule. It did the majority of the curing work. NaNO₃ didn’t seem to do much, so they experimented with adding NO₂ directly to the meat, cutting NO₃ out of the game. It worked. It saved time. Meat could be cured almost overnight. It could go to stores faster. It was a huge success.

Sort of. The problem is when the cure is rushed, the nitrite, NO₂, doesn’t disappear like it does when you cure traditionally over thirty days. It’s still present in the meat. NO₂ is a carcinogen.

That’s the reason people worry about nitrate cured salami and bacon. Meats may be cured with sodium nitrite—not nitrate—and rushed to market when the nitrite carcinogen is still present. This isn’t true for the cured meats we carry.

What about the “no nitrate” meat at supermarkets?

Nitrates are necessary for curing meat. You can’t cure without them and keep meat pink and safe. But if nitrates are necessary for curing meat, why do some labels say “nitrate free”?

The trick is celery. It’s high in nitrates. Concentrated celery juice is used in the curing, instead of the naturally occurring mineral sodium nitrate. The FDA allows it to be called “Natural Flavor” instead of “Sodium Nitrate.” The words may be different, but the chemistry behind it is the same.

You can taste both curing methods for yourself by frying up the two bacons from Nueske’s. The classic Applewood Smoked is slowly cured with traditional mineral nitrates. The Cherrywood Smoked is labeled “uncured” because it’s made with celery juice.