Easy way to make dry cured Italian Capocollo at home - Dry Curing Meats for Beginners

hey everybody welcome to the channel my name is eric and i hope you're having a great day today i'm going to show you the absolute easiest way to dry cure meats at home safely and produce incredibly delicious results dry cured meats are extremely expensive they fall into this unique category of food and most often people reserve them for special occasions but at the end of the day dry cured meats is all about food preservation the process has been around for millennium and so if you don't necessarily care about the gourmet element of dry cured meats and you're more into food preservation this video is for you as well all right before we begin there is one thing that i want to talk about and that's the use of curing salts for this recipe the use of curing salts is completely optional you don't need them in order to produce a safe product now i don't want to go into the why right now because that really deserves its own video so if you want me to make a video on why the use of curing salts is completely optional when doing whole muscle dry curing be sure to leave this video a thumbs up and a comment in the comment section below so with that out of the way let me show you the easiest possible way to make delicious capicola at home safely the first thing we're going to do is get our hands on a capicola also known as gabagool coba it's the neck muscle of the pig there is the loin portion of the capicola and if we flip it on the other side there's a series of muscle groups with inner muscular fat and connective tissue holding it all together absolutely delicious cut of meat makes for great steaks or a great roast so this is what the capicola looks like if you butcher your own animal this is where you can find the copa on the pig this is half a hog and from left to right you're looking at the shoulder you've got the loin the belly in the middle and then the ham or the hind leg on the right and if we look at the shoulder primal which is closest to the head this top section here is known as the boston bud or the pork shoulder and this bottom section right here is known as the picnic ham now normally right here you'd find a hawk and a trotter but i've already had that removed so there's a couple different ways to butcher the pork shoulder and it really just comes down to what you're looking for in america you'll sometimes find the pork shoulder butchered between rib number three and four in europe sometimes at rib number five but we want to do is elongate that copa muscle we want a nice big piece so right here where my left hand is above the spine this muscle is known as the capicola and we're gonna butcher this at rib number seven which is gonna give us a longer capicola including some of the loin it's gonna be really great so if you go to your butcher and you ask for the coppa and he won't sell it to you but he'll sell you a boston butt be sure to check out that link in the top right hand corner where i show you how to remove the coppa muscle from the boston butt so that you can make this delicious charcuterie at home all right so we have our copa muscle and the very first thing that we're going to do is weigh it to cure this copper muscle we're going to be using a method known as the equilibrium method and that simply means we're going to be adding a very precise amount of each spice in order for this to cure properly check out the link in the description box below which will take you to a recipe and all you've got to do is plug in the weight of your copa in grams in the recipe and it'll automatically tell you how much of each spice to add and that's what we have right here a combination of salt pepper sugar smoked paprika some cayenne pepper check out the recipe for the full list of ingredients we're going to take about half of that spice mix and pour it over one side of our mussel and then just begin to massage it in after a minute or so i'm going to pour the rest of that spice mix on the other side of that copper muscle and continue to do the same you're basically going to massage the spices on your copa muscle for roughly a minute on each side once you've got the spices well massaged in go ahead and take that koba mussel and place it in a vacuum seal bag if you don't have a vacuum sealed bag you could use a ziploc bag that's not a problem either because we're using the equilibrium method to cure our meat and the amount of spices that we added in the beginning is exactly the amount that we want our meat to absorb we need to make sure to scoop up any spices that fell off of our meat during the massaging process and add those into the bag with our coppa this is going to ensure that it cures properly once we have 100 of our spices in there and our bag is now ready i'm going to put a vacuum seal on it if you're using a ziploc bag just try and remove as much air as you can this is what mine looks like after a good vacuum seal and i'm going to place this in our home refrigerator every day or every other day i'm going to massage the muscle and then i'm going to flip it this is going to help it cure evenly so here's the big question how long do you allow your muscle to remain in your refrigerator before you know that it's fully cured well the easy answer is that it just depends on how big it is so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take a tape measure and i'm going to measure the diameter of my coppa now this is cylindrical so it's roughly the same top to bottom as it is left to right but we're looking at roughly three inches so we're going to head over to a website to determine how long this needs to brine i'm going to put a link for this website in the description box below so that you can bookmark it but about midway down the page you're going to find a tab that says brining time and if you click that tab it'll take you to a page that allows you to input your information so in our case we're going to put 3 inches and as you can see the inches has already checked and then we have to determine whether it's flat like a brisket or cone-shaped or tubular well in our case it's tubular so it's telling me 5.6 days is the minimum but we want to add 20 to that to make sure that we properly cure it we're going to use a plant-based wrap from the sausage maker called dry aging steak wraps these wraps were designed to dry aged beef in your home refrigerator and through some experimenting i found that they actually produce some pretty good charcuterie so there's basically two elements to this wrap you have the plant-based wrap itself and you have the netting now the plant-based wrap is unique in the sense that it controls the amount of moisture that's lost in a low humid environment and that's exactly what your refrigerator is a low humid environment so we have one wrap ready to go this is our capicola we just took it out of the fridge it's been curing for seven days and now it's ready to start drying and all we're going to do is open the bag and first give it a nice little smell because it smells amazing and we're going to take this and just pop it into a tray one of the questions we get a lot is whether or not it's necessary to rinse off your muscle after it's done curing and the answer is completely up to you you can rinse it off if you want or you can just blot it dry like i'm going to do right here i've done both with different muscle projects and they all come out incredible in this particular case i've got a lot of really nice spices chilies on this copa that i want to keep during the drying cycle it's going to give me a nice sort of outer crust of peppers and things like that so i don't want to rinse that off so we're just going to blot this dry to get it prepared for our wrap and this looks pretty good so let's go ahead and take that muscle and we're going to set it right in the center of our plant-based wrap these wraps work really good when the muscle is slightly damp so i'm just gonna wet my hands and dampen the exterior surface of this muscle so that plant-based wrap can have something to stick to and as you can see it sticks to it beautifully and all we're gonna do is just try to rub out as much air pockets that are remaining before we move on to the next fold [Music] so our copa is wrapped and we have the netting around it and that netting is really just going to help that plant-based wrap adhere to that coppa and it's also going to help keep its form so otherwise it would tend to want to lay flat and we're just going to go ahead and tie it off so that we can hang it once we have it tied off we need to weigh our coppa because this is going to let us know when it's finished in this particular case it weighs 1509 grams and i personally like to shoot for a target of about 35 weight loss so as my coppa hangs out in the fridge it's gonna lose moisture it's gonna begin to lose weight and when it gets to 981 grams it is ready for me to eat and at this point i'm just going to go ahead and place it in the refrigerator now depending on the kind of fridge you have i happen to have one that has gratings so i can hang my muscle if you don't have one that has gratings just be sure to place it on a rack that allows airflow on top and bottom so now we wait the refrigerator that you have your copa in is your regular home refrigerator nothing special about it so 34 to 38 fahrenheit or one to three celsius you know you're probably going to have your butter your eggs your milk in there and about once a week i weigh it and i don't even really keep track of the time but this is what it looks like after 35 weight loss it looks great it's firm to the touch and it looks like my wrap wants to come off pretty easy if you're having trouble getting your wrap off all you've got to do is soak it in some warm water for about 10 or 15 minutes and that wrap will basically get converted into a gelatin and just come off with no problem so that's a little tip for you i love the way it looks let's go ahead and cut it right down the middle and see what the center cut looks like before we slice it up and taste it [Music] all right that actually looks really good and as i inspect the center cut i am noticing a couple dark spots around the edge we got one here there's another one right above it and really that's just a product of the low humid environment in your refrigerator causing some of that outer meat to dry a little faster than the inside but the inside is nice and firm and i bet we won't even notice it after it's been sliced so let's go ahead and take this pop it on the slicer and give it a taste [Music] so [Music] all right here we go time for the taste test one thing i do want to mention when it comes to dry cured meats and it really doesn't matter what muscle you're doing you want to cut it as thin as you can if you have a meat slicer even better because you can get those nice thin consistent cuts if not you want to use a nice sharp knife but the thinner the better because you get that really great mouth feel if you tend to cut your dry cured muscles too thick they could seem a little chewy all right so here we go this is our capicola all right wow that's delicious the salt level's perfect the spice level is perfect just the overall flavor coming from this capricola is incredibly fresh the seasonings really stand out and the inner muscular fat from this capicola is i don't know if you can see but it's just slowly starting to melt on my fingers creating this glistening effect and when you eat it it literally just melts in your mouth along with the meat that turns into this buttery and slightly nutty deliciousness absolutely incredible all right now that you know how to make capicola let me show you how to store it because i'm sure you're going to have a whole bunch of it so let me show you how to do that storing your capicola is very easy the first thing you want to do is inspect for any mold if there is mold on your capicola just rub it down with some vinegar to kill the mold and then place it in a vacuum seal bag next we're going to vacuum seal our bag and depending on the type of vacuum sealer that you have you're going to want to select the option that allows you to have an extra tight vacuum so for us we're just going to click the option tight we're working with dry food and that's already selected and so now we're just going to go ahead and place the bag in there and get it vacuumed vacuum sealing your charcuterie not only extends the life of your dry cured meat by allowing you to keep it in your refrigerator for a very long time but it also has some really cool benefits it will equalize any remaining moisture in your dry cured meat and while it's in the fridge hanging out waiting for you to eat it it's going to slowly continue to age which will further develop its flavor here's our cappy all done nice tight vacuum on it we're gonna place this into the refrigerator until we're ready to make a very cool charcuterie platter all right everyone thanks for watching this video if you have any questions leave me a comment in the comment section below if you found this video entertaining or informative in any way a thumbs up would be helpful and if you're new to this channel and like food preservation techniques diy projects we invite you to subscribe and click that notification bell so you can be notified of all future uploads thanks again for watching we'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: 2 Guys & A Cooler

Views: 303,038

Keywords: Food preservation, Copa, gabagool, how to dry cure meat at home, making dry cured meats in the refrigerator, How to butcher a pig, making sausage at home, capocollo, capicola

Id: ZvEwTZlgdaA

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021