I've made bresaola before and I thought it was good. So I ordered an eye round and gathered my cure ingredients together.
Ingredients
1 kg eye round of beef, trimmed of all exterior fat
kosher salt, 3 % of meat weight
2 T sugar
Instacure #2, .25% of meat weight
5 g black pepper, ground
2.5 g fresh rosemary
5 g dried thyme
5 juniper berries
Method
1. Weight your eye round after trimming, mine weighed 1088 g.
2. Mix together your cure ingredients. (1088 x .03 = 32.64 g salt; 1088 x .0025 = 2.72 g cure #2 )
3. Rub cure all over meat. I did this in a plastic bag that I was going to store the meat in while waiting in the fridge. The salt and cure will pull moisture out of the meat and replace it with salt and flavoring. Cure for 2 weeks, massaging and turning every day.
4. Remove from curing bag, wash off cure and pat dry. Weigh it again. Record weight, you are going to need it. Then you can tie the meat into a nice tubular shape and coat with a layer of extra flavorings, such as black pepper, and rosemary.
5. Put into an UMAI Bag and seal tight using their vac mouse system. On the bag write the weight of the post cured meat. Figure out the target weight which will be 35 - 40% less.
6. Put into fridge on a rack so that air can circulate all around it. The UMAI bags are one-way bags, air and moisture goes out, nothing goes in. The bags are very tender, so be careful, do not use a rack that has any sharp projections or corners. Every week for 4 - 8 weeks, weigh the meat. When it has reached its target moisture loss, you are ready to crack it open and slice thinly for a treat.
Day 1, Week 1 (see above)
Day 4, Week 1 (see below)
The cure is penetrating the meat. It feels a bit more resistant to the touch, firmer to the finger poke.
Day 7, 1 week, half way through curing process (see below)
The poke test reveals it is getting quite firm and there is a lot more juice surrounding the eye round.
Today was the day to pull it out of the cure and clean off and seal in the UMAI bag.
Since I need to wait until it has lost 30-40% of its weight. I arbitrarily selected a loss of 35%. That target weight is 714 grams.
What will I look for in the meat in order to decide if it is ready to eat or not. Firmness to the finger poke, rosy red color.
I am not really happy with the seal of the bag. I know it does not have to be air tight, and over time it will pull away from the meat, but the issue may be I coated the cured meat with pepper and paprika which may inhibit the seal. The UMAI bags are 1 way bags. They allow moisture out, but not in. This is how you can cure things, or age steaks without a dedicated space to hang. I will monitor the situation for a couple of days, and if it looks like it is not properly sealed, I will wash off the pepper and paprika and reseal in a new bag.
I rebagged this as the seal was not good. I washed off most of the paprika and pepper, and rebagged it in a new bag. There was a bit of trouble getting the seal to work, but I persevered and finally, it worked. I also cut a bit of drawer liner that is breathable and put it on top of the rack in the fridge so that I could prevent any pinholes in the bag. The bags feel quite sturdy, but are very fragile, apparently!
Weighed it again, and it was 1063 g, 65% of that is 691 g so that is the target weight. Should take about 4 weeks.
Today's weigh in: 873 g Only 200 g left
Photo Op
You can see that the bag is coming away from the meat, that is normal. It shows that the meat is shrinking and giving off it's moisture. In handling the bresaola today, it is getting firm on one end and has a lovely pliability when squeezed. I am getting so psyched about this!
