The people · The curer
Peter, The Cotswold Curer
He turned 210 into bresaola and salami. A chemistry graduate who has been making charcuterie by hand on the edge of Cirencester since 2011, and who had never made a beef salami before her.
The curer who took her on
Steak was only ever going to be part of 210. The rest of her needed someone patient. Peter runs The Cotswold Curer, which made its first batch of handmade salami in 2011 and now makes air-dried salami, chorizo and pancetta from outdoor-reared pork from rare and traditional breeds.
He already knew something most people don’t: old animals can make the best cured meat. His salami uses older breeding sows, whose meat is darker and richer. So when the butchers handed over joints from an eleven-year-old dairy cow, he didn’t see a problem. He saw an experiment.
He studied chemistry at university, and it shows. He talks about salt, nitrates and haemoglobin the way other people talk about the weather: calmly, and with obvious pleasure.
What she became
Bresaola and the first beef salami
Bresaola. The top rump and silverside were trimmed back to clean, dense muscle, rubbed with salt, black pepper, rosemary, thyme and juniper, and left in the fridge for about ten days. Then they hung in the curing room at 12 to 13 °C and 70 to 75% humidity for about six weeks.
Salami. The topside went into salami. With almost no fat on an old milking cow, the mix needed extra fat. It was stuffed, fermented for two days and hung to dry: the first beef salami The Cotswold Curer had ever made. The batch got a name to replace an ear number: Retired Dairy Cow Salami.
Want to eat bresaola like this? Try our bresaola, rocket and Parmesan.
In his words
The interview
Recorded in his curing room for the film, condensed and lightly edited.
What did you make of her meat?
The meat looks fabulous. What we find with the salami we make is that we sometimes use the old breeding sows, and older animals make for very good cured meat. So let’s hope this is the same. That’s lovely dark meat. That’s normally quite a good sign.
Why would an old cow be any good?
Grass-fed animals are always far tastier, and she’s had the slow-growing nature of eleven years. The texture of the meat is very important as well as the flavour.
How do you start a bresaola?
The thing with bresaola is to try and get a continuous bit of meat, so no fissures, because sometimes the mould can get in and spoil it. So we trim off any scraggy bits, all the fat and any silver skin. The trimming’s by far the most time-consuming bit. Once they’ve gone in the fridge, it’s nature and time and science.
What goes in the cure?
Salt is the main ingredient for curing meat. As the meat dries it reduces the available water, which preserves it. Get the amount of salt wrong and the product’s not going to be any good. The mix we normally go for has salt, black pepper, a bit of rosemary, a bit of thyme and a little juniper. I find that works really well with beef. As long as you get the salt level right, you can put whatever flavours you want in there.
Should the spices hide the beef?
If the beef’s really flavoursome, it should just be accentuated. Did you know Parma ham, prosciutto crudo, has only got salt? They don’t use any spice at all.
Then what?
We get an even covering onto every exposed face of the meat and rub it in, and the salt will penetrate the meat by a process of osmosis. For something this size, probably ten days in the fridge. Then it comes into the curing room. We keep the temperature about 12 or 13 degrees and the humidity between 70 and 75, so it dries slowly and evenly. That takes probably six weeks.
And the salami?
We’re about to stuff the first beef salami ever. Well, for the Cotswold Curer anyway. We use some older pigs in our salami, the old breeding sows, and the meat is much darker. It actually makes for really good salami. So I’d be interested to see whether the older cow has the same thing.
Where does the colour come from?
It’s basically the blood, the iron in the blood, that gives all the nice colours. I studied chemistry at university, so there’s a bit of a tie-in here. There’s a lot of chemistry that goes on in the curing process. Nitrates help preserve the meat and give it that characteristic red colour. If you just use salt, you get a sort of grey meat.
How do you keep it safe?
We add a starter culture, lactic-acid-producing bacteria, and ferment the salamis in my modified bread prover at 27 degrees for two days. That lowers the pH and makes it harder for dangerous bacteria to grow. So we should get a nice, tasty, safe product to eat.
Any advice for a first-timer?
The first time I used the machine, I ended up with probably a ten-foot circle of sausage meat on that wall.
Taste his work
The Cotswold Curer, Cirencester
Handmade charcuterie from the Cotswolds, with flavours from fennel and red wine to venison and black truffle. 210’s bresaola and salami were made for the film and aren’t for sale, but everything else is.
- Makes
- Air-dried salami, chorizo and pancetta
- Buy
- Online shop; farmers’ markets in Stroud, Charlbury and East Oxford; local farm shops and delis
- Web
- thecotswoldcurer.com
- @the.cotswold.curer
Market days change, so check his website before you go.
