Hello, everyone. My name is Ivo and welcome to Cooking with the Coias. Today we're not going to be cooking, but rather we're going to be making. I'd like to share with you how to make a homemade capicola from scratch. The traditional Italian method for curing and making your own capicola. It's easier than you think. And I'd like to share with you how my father made it, how my grandfather made it, my great grandfather, and so on. This is how our family has made topical for years. Of course, many people make capicola. Everyone has their own recipes. I'm going to share with you our family recipe. It may differ from yours, but I will share with you this. I have never had a bad capicola. It's never too salty. It's always perfect. Let me share some tips and our technique right now. So what I have here, folks, is a whole pork shoulder. It's also sometimes called a New York shoulder. And you can see on the backside there is a skin and fat typically left on the on the cut. But I'm going to flip it over. This is the side we want to work with, the non skin skin side. And just so you know, this part of the whole shoulder is called the picnic roast. This part is called the shoulder butt. And you can buy the roast, the picnic roast separate. You can also buy the pork butt, separate. The part that you're going to want to make capicola is the pork butt. So if you buy the pork, but with the bone in, you can make a nice capicola. So we're going to focus on this part, which is the pork butt. And the reason we want the skin side down, you can see the bone here. I want you to see that bone. There's a bone right here. That's the shoulder blade right there. And the back side of the blade. It's like a letter T, right. There's a bone that comes down. But on this part, it's just one flat. So what we want to do is remove. Remove the meat from the flap. And if you take a look here, I could almost even with my finger. Look at this. See, here there's almost a natural separation of the meat there. But even if there wasn't, you want to start from the inside edge of this bone and cut across the bone, actually scraping that bone and removing this chunk right here, that's the chunk of meat that's going to be boneless. And that's the chunk of meat that is absolutely perfect for topical. The right amount of fat, the right amount of meat, the right amount of flavor. So let's remove this piece right now. So I'm going to start just by with this natural separation is. Okay. You can even look at that. I can even pull it a bit here. Pull it a bit. Okay. It almost naturally separates. And the bone is right here. Okay. So I'm going to take my knife and basically run it this way, right along the bone, horizontally, scraping the bone along the way. Now, of course, the bone doesn't run all the way there here. But it is it covers this half of the of the park. So just run right across the bone. And then when you get to the end of the bone, just cut straight down. There we go. Now, this will make sausage. This now is our capicola. But as you can see, it's kind of not the right shape. So all you want to do now, once you've cut it off, the. But all you want to do now is shape it. So, you know, I want a shape, a bolt like this. I want my capicola to be about that shape right there. So I'm going to just cut, cut right along there. Right. Just cut along there. Remove that. I'm going to see access. Okay, There we go. More sausage, meat. Okay. And. And then I flip it over and I see there's, like, a little tag in the fat here and a little bit of fat there. So, you know what? Just trim that off. Okay, We're just trimming it. Let's see here. If I can turn it, I can show you. I'm just trimming off that fat. Okay. And it's kind of like a because it was like a loose fact, right? You want you want to be end up with one nice piece of of meat, more sausage meat there. And here's like a little again, another little tag again. You see a little tag in there. We'll just remove that. Now, mind you, you don't have to do that, but you want to make this as nice a shape as possible. And there we go. That's that's I'm happy with that. And then you can see it's bulging out here a bit. If I really want to, I can I could trim that a little bit, but I think I'm going to leave it just the way it is. I like how it looks. Of course, a little bit of fat there. That's fine. Okay. That was it for the hard part, if you can believe it. Now, what we have to do is salt it. So what I have here, I have just a plastic container. Any container will do, hopefully with no holes in it because there will be some liquid released. So just get your container and I'm going to start off by putting some salt just on the bottom of my container. This is just regular table salt. Okay. That's what my my father use. That's what I use. So then you take your capicola that we so nicely cut and salt it all around. Be generous with the salt because the salt is what's going to cure your cup of cold. It's going to start the curing process, I should say. So lots of salt. As you can see. Salt is not expensive, folks, so be generous with the salt. Okay, so I'm just going to tuck some salt in around it and a little bit more on top just to be a little extra generous. Why not? Okay. So I'm going to say generously, salt here, meat. All right. Now, this is the controversial part, not controversial, but or many people have their own way of doing it. For my father, it's always been leave it under salt for 15 to 16 hours. That's it. No more. You have a one hour window between 15 and 16 hours. I usually let it go to 16. I let it sit under salt for 16 hours. So I'm just looking right now. It's 9 p.m.. Today is also January 11th. So let's bring this down. I'm going to put it in my container. I'll just put it on the on the floor in the container. And we're going to let it sit there for 15 to 16 hours. So here I am in my cantina. It's been warm so far. It's January 11th, but it hasn't really been that cold so far this winter. So it's only about 48 degrees, but it's no problem for our cup of cool. It's covered in salt. It's perfectly fine. I'm just going to leave it in here for the 15 to 16 hours and then we'll come back and I'll show you what we do next. So here we are a day later, and as I mentioned yesterday about sausage making, if you haven't seen it yet, I've got a great video for you on how to make sausage sharing my recipe tips and techniques. I'll put a link in the description for you. And also before you ask, can you can you use a loin pork loin roast to make a cup of cool? Yes, you can. Can you use a tenderloin? Yes, you can. However, they will not be as flavorful as this cut of meat that we're using today to make the cup of cool. This is a true cup of cool. Those other cuts of meat. Yes, you can use them. They will be much leaner and not as flavorful, but yes, they will still turn out, just so you know. Okay, So. There is our pork capicola. And what we're going to do now is remove all this salt and prep it for aging. So let's go do that right now. Okay. Now, in case I didn't mention it, it has been it's just coming up to 16 hours right now. So at this point, all we have to do is remove the salt from our meat. Okay. Now, I know my father used to use wine. He used to get a bottle of wine and wipe all the salt off with a bottle of wine. But since not everybody I know has wine. The other alternative is just to use water. Quite simply, just remove all the salt from the meat because the curing now, the salting. That's it. It's done. Okay. That part is done. And you can see that's one beautiful capicola right there. Very nice. And it feels you can tell it feels a little different than yesterday because it's been sitting in salt. It's a little bit slightly firmer. And at this point, what you want to do is just dry it. We're going to dry it because we're going to prep it for for storage. So let's get this dried and I'll take you over because we're going to spice this up. Now what we need to do is spice up our capicola. Now there's a variety of spices you could use. I'm going to use just I'm going to make this what I'm going to say a sweet cup of coffee. So I'm just going to use some black pepper and I'm going to use paprika. Now, you could you if you wanted hot, you could put chili peppers all around. You could put cayenne pepper all around. All depends if you want a hot or a mild capicola. I'm making it mild that way. The the grandkids can enjoy it as well. So basically, I'm going to sprinkle a little bit of black pepper all around. Okay. We're going to get the top and the bottom to. Okay. And then I like to use I like to be a little heavier with the paprika. So let's put the paprika on and rub that on. Now we go all around. We're going to do this all around, folks. You get the side here. Let's get to ends in the end. There we go. All right. Now that we've got that space, how we want. Again, you can do the spices that you enjoy best. Okay, Now that we've got it spiced up, we have to prepare it for. To hang it now to two main ways of doing it. One is to use a cup of cold mash. And that's what I'm going to use. You can see it's not is not as big or as wide as the cup of cold, but it's an elastic mesh. So it stretches and the elastic helps keep the capicola tight and firm while it's hanging. The other option is to use a casing, a natural casing, for example. And then you would put the capicola in the casing instead of in this sleeve. But I like to use this cup. Of course. Leave it to last size. It's easy to use. It's not expensive and it allows a lot of air to get in and it dries properly. So if you use a casing, I need my scissors. If you use a casing, make sure to poke holes in the casing so that your cup of cold will dry. So, again, this is not expensive, so I'm going to make it a little bit bigger than what I actually need. All right. And now comes the fun part. So to get that capicola in, it becomes a bit of a challenge. So with the natural casing or even with this one trick that my father used to do is he would take a piece of PVC pipe and he would rather large so that this would fit in through the pipe. So he would put the casing or the mesh on the on the one end of the pipe, push the capicola through the pipe, and it comes to the other end and it gets very easily done. But of course, I'm not doing that today. I've opted for the more difficult method and that is to work my way around, pull it over. And then just kind of roll it, roll it down. It's a bit of a pain, but take your time. There's no rush. Oops. Let's try that again. I like to start it from one end. Flip it. Once you get it started, it's not so bad. Poke it in. Oh, I thought that right through. Okay. And now let's bring it all over. Let's pull it over. So you're going to have to work with it a bit, but it will eventually come through. Okay. It's coming through nicely now. Okay. And you want enough here that we have to tie the end to let it hang. So in a poke that through, it's get enough mesh here on the end here. That's pretty good right there. And it looks like I have a bunch here. You see, it's kind of bunched up. I'll just unravel that a bit. So, again, it's it's not really difficult. It's just a little bit a little bit of a pain. All right. And put that back through. I think that's pretty good. All right. So now we have our capicola in our mesh, and all we have to do now are tie at both ends. So you could use some butcher's twine or some string. It has to be strong enough because this has to hang. So you definitely want your string here twine to be strong enough to hold the capicola. So I'm going to just tie both ends. To this end. First, this is the shorter end, so I'm not going to hang it off of this end. So I thought it would be nice if Laura were here to give me a hand just to hold that mess for me. Hard time grabbing that mess. Okay, let's try this again. Grab the mesh again. It's not going to hang from this part, but I still want to tie it because you want that compression. All right. There we go. That's better. Okay. And I'm just going to tie a regular knot. No fishermen's. Not this time. And I see there's a little bit of access here that I can grab. I know they're not okay. It's actually good enough to hang on of that. But we're going to use this end because, like I say, there's a lot more here to hold on to. So basically, they're I want to make it as tight as possible. Take my string. And let's make on that. Hey. No. And now what I like to do is even with with all this mess, I just kind of open it up and I make another not going across the other way. And then, as Laura taught me on your last night, go through once it go through a second time. There we go. And now I'm just going to make a loop here and an extra. Not so that here we go. We can hang it up just like that. Because what it's going to do now is we've got to hang this up in the container so that it can dry out. So let's go do that right now. So back in the container, we are we tied it up and now we're going to hang it up and that's it. It now has to do its thing and dry and you want to make sure there's nothing around it. It needs to have air all the way around my container a.k.a cold room. It is cold because it's vented to the outside, but it never freezes. So this is going to hang now three months plus or minus. It all depends on the humidity levels, the temperature and the thickness of the meat. Now it's thinner up top. It's going to dry up there quicker. It's going to take a little longer here. But all you do to test it is just give it a squeeze. If you could tell if it's still soft in the middle, then it hasn't cured yet. So we're going to let this sit. Today is January the 12th, and we'll see how long it takes this to cure. But that's it. Now it's just a matter of being patient and waiting. Actually, just before we begin, in case you're interested, I wanted to show you the bone that I removed from that meat yesterday, just to give you an idea. So this, as you can see, is the blade. That's the part we took the capicola off of. So if I put it down this way, this was the blade part where we remove the capicola from. So I just wanted you to see that we remove the cap of coal from this blade. This was the underside, as I mentioned. It's like a letter T, and this is the knuckle part. I'm going to save these. This is going to use in the source. This I'm going to use in a soup. Okay, Now let's continue. So here we are. It is April 3rd. So it's been basically almost three months and I do the squeeze test. And it's nice and firm. It's not really soft in the middle. It's got a tiny little bit of give, but not much. So it's nice and firm. And you know what that means, folks? When it's solid like that, it means our cup of cold is dry straight through and ready to be eaten. So it's the squeeze test. That's all you have to do. Otherwise, as a general rule, as you see, we started early January. It's now early April. So basically three months. General rule of thumb, you start early January. By Easter, your cup of cold is ready. And in fact, let's go take a look at this capicola and cut into it and see what we've got inside. And of course, I got to do the taste test. So, folks, there's our cup of cool. And if you take a close look, you might be able to see there's a couple little spots of mold on it and that's no problem. That's very, very normal. And we're just going to at this point, we're going to wash that off. However, if we did not want to cut into this right now, the best way to preserve it here's mine from last year is just vacuum seal it. Just vacuum seal it and it will stay on the counter. Once you vacuum all the aero, it'll keep no problem. You do not have to keep it in the fridge. It's preserved, it's airtight. You're good to go. So but for today, we're going to cut into the fresh one because I want to show you what we have, what we have done here. So first thing I'm going to do, we're going to remove the mesh. So just over a sink, give a little cut to the end there, and then quite simply, remove our mesh. Okay. And there I think you can see probably a little better the mold there. Now you see that mold spot there, right? No problem. You see, there's another one right there. No problem. So quite simply, with a little bit of cold water and a brush, just brush off, you're going to brush off the little bit of the spices that were on the outside. And you're also going to brush off, you know, any mold if you happen to have a little bit of mold on there. And again, that's perfectly fine. If you do, it's perfectly normal. Okay. There we go. That is pretty good. Take a paper towel and we'll just dry that up a bit. There we go. Isn't that much better? Okay, let us know. Let's cut into it. So. Well, in order to show you, I think I'll cut here at the thicker part because this will be drier. But I want you to see how dry it is even on the thick part. Okay. Oh, that looks, folks. Tell you what. Take a look at that. Isn't that beautiful? It's dried nicely, cured nicely. And you know what it's going to taste? Dynamite. Okay. Let me get the knife. And let's cut into this here, okay? Yeah, absolutely Perfect. We will cut a little piece off of here. I'm going to try to slice it relatively thin. There we go. How's that for a nice thin slice? It's almost like you're eating a prosciutto. In fact, it's much easier to make the cup of cold than it is to make a prosciutto. And the flavor, folks, is every bit as good. Mm hmm. Now you're talking. Beautiful. Cured nicely, flavored nicely. And you remember the salt that we did for how long? We did it again, look at the results. And it doesn't taste salty. It tastes perfectly cured. Now, if you wanted, you could also cut you see a little bit of edge there. You could you could cut the little outside edge off, but there's no need to Once you've washed and scrubbed, it is perfectly fine to eat. Oh, my goodness. Amazingly delicious, folks. That's the cut of meat you want to do. That's how you want to preserve it. And folks, if you do it and you've got a container, dry it. Remember the boat, the three month rule, give or take, as a general rule, and you'll be able to enjoy some beautiful homemade capicola like I'm going to do today. I don't know when this is going to air, but Easter Sunday is coming up. Today is Monday, actually. So Easter Sunday is this Sunday. I believe what I'll do is I will cut this up and and and have the family enjoy it for this Easter as part of our antipasto review or tuning in from folks. I hope you give this cup a call making a try where we are keeping the Italian tradition going, folks. That's what we're doing. And until next time. Bon appétit. Of course, I'm going to go cut myself another piece or two. Oh, that's for sure.
