Armed now with the fresh concentrate and dried powdered Calabrian chile peppers that Scott sent me, I’m ready to try my hand at a second batch of Nduja.

This time around, I’m taking a much more experimental approach and making several small batches, with a mix of meats and fermentation cultures. For my first batch, I’m going to try the recipe that Jason Molinari originally sent me, which calls for pork belly as the only meat, mixed in a 2:1 ratio with the chiles, in the hope that this pure pork belly version will recreate the creaminess of the Calabrian original.

After that, I’ll experiment with mixing the pork belly in a 1:1 ratio with other meats, shoulder, tongue, liver, and see how that changes the texture and flavor. As a whole new take or twist on Nduja, I might even make a pâté version, using the pâté parisienne technique.

For now, here’s the recipe for the pure pork belly version I’ve worked out:

5 pounds (2.25 kilos) of pork belly
300 grams Alfonso Esposito concentrato di peperoncini rossi “tipo speciale” picanti
140 grams Marinella brand Hot Pepper “powder” Piccantissimo Calabrese
37 grams kosher salt
5 grams dextrose
4 grams cure #2
0.3 grams Bactoferm T-SPX culture

As you can see, the quantity of hot peppers I used only add up to 440 grams or less than a quarter of the recipe, but it produced the amount of heat I remember from the original: plenty hot, but not searing. It’s quite astonishing how all that pork fat ameliorates the heat. I’m guessing that it needed less chile because I’m working with concentrate and powdered chiles, both of them picante or picantissimo!

I progressively ground the pork belly, first through my coarsest die, then the finest. I then mixed it in my Hobart stand mixer with the spices and cure until thoroughly incorporated, at each stage keeping the pork as cold as possible. After mixing, it did have such a creamy, spreadable texture that I could see how it got the nickname “red Nutella.” I stuffed it in beef middles, and I’ll leave it in the cold-smoking box on top of my Bradley for several days to ferment, turning on the smoke occasionally. Then I’ll hang them to dry for a bit, testing them periodically to see how the flavor develops. But it’s sure good enough to eat some for lunch today!

Tags: chilis, fermented sausage, Italian, pork

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 10:45 am and is filed under Feature, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.