Earlier this spring I bought a CELR-12 unit from Tablesmith.com. I had heard about this unit from a YouTube channel that I follow, and here is their website twoguysandacooler.com. The YouTube channel is all about making sausage and cured meats, a fabulous site with a wealth of information on making sausage. The host, Eric, was doing a review of the CELR-12 after having taken it for a spin by making cured pork tenderloin, coppa, and bresaola. I was so intrigued that I went to Tablesmith and ordered the unit.
The unit is a box that needs to be plugged in and three hoses that get thread through the drain port of any cooler. You need a drain hole, otherwise you will need to drill one into the cooler. Ideally, the drain hole should be 3/4-7/8 of an inch in diameter. It needs to accommodate all three hoses. You can remove the caps from the hoses and reattach them if necessary. However, over time, it will make the connections loose. The guys at Tablesmith have thought of everything, included with the unit are little clamps that you can use to hold a loosened hose onto the caps. Marshall, the developer and creator of CELR-12 has been really wonderful. He has answered my newbie questions and has been very supportive. Thank you.
How does the unit work, you may ask? It keeps the cooler at a constant (nearly constant) temp that you set, and circulates the cool air throughout. It has a crazy wide range of temperatures, from 28°F to 140°F. I have only used 55°F for the curing of the meats. The humidity is kept about 85-88% and you will need to empty the little drip tank and dry the bottom of the cooler every now and then.
I used the same recipes that Eric published on the two guys site and followed them to a tee. The results were, (drum roll insertion here) spectacular. You will need to purchase collagen sheets and those can be gotten from The Sausage Maker or from Amazon, but patronize the business first please.
The pork tenderloin was a bit too soft for my taste, and that could be because I didn't have a good enough deli slicer to cut it paper thin. The pork tenderloin, coppa and bresaola were outstanding in their look and in their taste. Click the link below to open up the recipe pages.
What I learned by doing this:
1. It's fun! I used to use Umai bags to make these sorts of things but it just didn't have the same taste or smell as this does. And it's the smell that is fabulous. The collagen sheets need to spritzed with a "warrior" mold culture (all explained very well on the 2 guys channel). This is a penicillin type mold, very similar to that on brie cheese that colonizes quickly and fights off (get the warrior name) other molds from getting established. The smell is intoxicating.
2. Every dry cure starts with a wet cure. I found out the difference between Cure #1 and #2. Cure #1 is for any project that dry cures for less than 30 days. Not a day longer. Cure #2 is for dry cures that last for more than 31 days. The pork tenderloin used Cure #1 because it was only a 2-2.5 week drying time. The other projects used Cure #2 because their cure took 34 days.
3. The collagen sheets are very, very easy to work with and do their job incredibly well. They allow the moisture from the meat to escape, creating that supercharged high humidity environment with the CELR-12.
4. Patience is necessary. This is particularly difficult when you are getting to the end of the curing time. You are weighing the product hoping to get to the target weight sooner. But you can't rush it. No matter how fabulous the smells are when you open up the cooler to pull out a project and weigh it.
5. A good deli slicer is absolutely necessary to take advantage of the flavors, textures and aromas that your project emit. Too thick and it just feels gummy in the mouth, kind of unpleasant.
Now for the finished project photos
You can see the darker ring around the outer edge. The outside edge cured at a faster rate than the center. After cutting, you can bag it up in a vacuum sealer bag and over a short amount of time the ring with disappear. Has no effect on the flavor. Note the nice mold coverage. The collagen sheet gets peeled off but the mold flavor goes through to the cured meat.
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| Pork Coppa |
