After last month’s NY Times article came out, my stash of Nduja was depleted in 9 hours, 41 minutes, and 17 seconds.  Lots of interesting comments have been coming in.  As the largest maker of Nduja in the country, Chris Cosentino’s Boccalone got the lion’s share of the coverage, but a number of correspondents, including a few Calabrians, have confided to me that they have tried it and found it wanting: disappointing, inconsistent, or even downright “terribile!”  So you might just have lucked on the best Nduja in the US, right here.

One of the interesting points in Julia Moskin’s article was how nduja gets “translated” when it’s made over here.  The Calabrian original is rude and crude, rough and tumble, and “absolutely takes the top of your head off,” as Nancy Harmon Jenkins says in the article, so there’s plenty of room for a “meatier and mellower” version.  In addition to the pâté I created, I like this version made with bison meat.  Besides, a more traditional nduja salami, made entirely from pork belly, can take the better part of a year to ferment and dry, while this one should be ready in a little more than a month.  Hopefully it will be enough to keep the ravenous hordes from pounding down my door, while the killer nduja slowly cures.

As I wrote before, I think all the peppers, sweet and hot, in nduja marry particularly well with a rich, dark red meat like bison.  As I also wrote in my last nduja post, I think it’s quite possible to make a perfectly good version of nduja with a variety of peppers from all over.  For this batch, I combined 2 pounds of ground bison with 5 pounds of pork belly (ground through a coarse plate and then the fine one) with 20 grams of Calabrian chilis that looked (and tasted!) like cayenne, 20 grams of the powdered mix of Calabrian chilis that Scott is able to get from Coluccio’s, and, for a little smoky kick, 20 g of hot Spanish pimentón.  I also added a bunch of fire-roasted, sweet, red peppers – an entire 4 lbs!  Last time I used these, I thought they added too much liquid to the mix, so this time, I patted them dry on paper towels, then spread them out on drying racks, and placed them in a convection oven set on low (about 250º F) to dry down to about 1 lb before combining them with the hot chilis to create my nduja fireball (photo right).

Lots of salt, a few grams of Bactoferm’s T-SPX culture, a few grams of cure #2, and that’s it.  Like the Calabrian originals I saw, I stuffed this mix into a beef bung (more on this wonderfully named casing later!), and it will get intermittent smoke over the next month before it’s ready to light your fire.

I can tell you that I took a smidge of this sausage meat (all that was left in my stuffer) to KaM’s last weekend, where we spread blobs of it on top of a pizza with green olives and onions, and it melted down in the intense heat of the oven to make one fabulously-tasting pie!  Spicy as this mix is, it only uses about 10% of the Calabrian chilis that are going into the hot version that I plan to make later this week!

Tags: chilis, fermented sausage, Italian, pork

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 7:37 am and is filed under Club Offerings, 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.