In the beginning there was desire.  The desire was to make my own proscuitto.  The Italian salt cured and air dried ham is pretty awesome – even the stuff you buy at the supermarket is up there, but when you get the real thing straight off the bone, sliced thin by hand, just on it’s own, all melty on the tongue, a little salty with that unmistakable back of the throat depth to it, it reaches the dizzy heights of death row last meal request…THAT is what I desired.

So how do you achieve such divinity when you’re living in a bedsit in Edinburgh?  Well, you buy your dad a ‘make your own proscuitto’ kit and see how he goes.  The kit was just a bag of salt with some curing salt and a few flavourings mixed in, and it worked pretty well – it wasn’t left to cure long enough, but that parma ham flavour was undoubtedly trying to make itself known.

Skip forward some 10 years and I still hadn’t attempted proscuitto, although I’d thought about it a lot (story of my life). So I spent a few months reading up about it and talking about it and even bought a book (Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn – buy it!).  And now I wanted to make salami, chorizo, saucisson sec, mazzafegati and all manner of cured sexiness.

The difficult bit is getting the right environment for your porky friend to spend a few weeks or months air drying – it’s basically a combination of temperature, humidity and breeze that should allow the pork to dry at the correct speed without it going rancid.  The higher the temperature/lower the humidity/stronger the breeze, the faster it dries, so in theory you want to lose the right amount of liquid over a period of time to allow those flavours to develop.  It seems the ‘correct’ parameters are 15 degrees C, 60-70% humidity and a very gentle breeze.  So now that I live in a 2 bed flat on the northern beaches of Sydney where the temperatures get up to 40 degrees, the humidity is all over the place and I don’t have a cellar, how the fuck do I achieve that???

I bought a cheap thermometer and hydrogometer just to check what my flat was like and if I could use a couple of freezer blocks rotated nightly to cool a cupboard down, maybe a bowl of water in the bottom to steady the humidity – nah, not gonna work.  I looked at things people had created from second hand fridges with humidifiers in them and holes drilled in the side – nah, too expensive, not enough room, etc.  Fuck it – I’ll just use my cupboard.

So after much inactivity but with a load of desire, I just decided to go for it – middle of a Sydney summer and it’s 27 degrees C most days, but I can’t wait any longer, let’s just see how it goes.  And I tell you what – it was absolutely chuffing awesome!