It is a priviledge to make charcuterie, spending time researching recipes and methods
A very lucky man from the USA once spent a year travelling around Spain learning about the art of charcuteria (as it is called there) He is Jeffrey Weiss and you can buy his book Charcuteria, that’s what I did, years ago
Some traditions are so bold and unusual that they deserve to be revived, a black chorizo, described in Charcuteria, made with more onion than meat is the Sabadiego. The story goes that the local Papal representative declared that there was so little meat in it that it could be eaten on a Saturday, hence the name, ish
I mince about 10kg of onions and then fry them in batches in rendered lard, which makes me smell pretty wonderful. Date night is not the same day as Sabadiego day.
To the cooled onions I add pork lean, cubed fat, a whole load of blood, some very good smoked paprika, handfuls of minced garlic, oregano and some Pedro Ximinez. The usual way to ferment salami is to add the preserving salts and the culture that creates the ferment. The culture is a mixture of lactobacillus and some other lovely useful flora, they consume all the sugars from the meat and the onions and the sherry (there is sugar in meat) and they create some lactic acid and some lovely funky stuff that makes salami salami
The fermentation is just like fermenting beer, or making kimchi or even bread. It needs a bit of warmth and a bit of time, this is such an exciting process to see the salami colour become richer, the smell changes from zingy fresh to fermenty earthiness
The embutido (salami) that emerges after 3 or 4 weeks is sweet, deeply umami, irn bru blood-tangy and full of those satisfying indescribable flavours that make a fermented meat more like a wine than a sausage