Cut a good salami and you can read how it was made. The red is deep and even all the way to the middle. The fat sits in clean white flecks instead of smearing into the lean. The casing wears a thin white bloom, and the first taste has a faint sour tang under the salt and spice. None of that is luck. It comes from a handful of decisions you make in the first two days, and one you make at the end: when to stop. That last one is a matter of weight, which is where a Meatdryer hook comes in.
This is how to make salami at home. First, though, where it comes from, because almost everything about the method makes more sense once you know why people started doing it.
Salt, pork and a cold winter: a short history of salami
The word gives it away. Salame comes from the Latin for salt, and salting is what salami has always been about: taking meat that would rot within days and turning it into something that keeps through a winter. Pig slaughter across Europe happened in the cold months, when there were no flies and no heat, and whatever wasn't eaten fresh was salted, stuffed into the animal's own intestines and hung.
The Romans already had a word for it. They made a smoked sausage called lucanica, named after Lucania in the south of Italy, and the scholar Varro wrote about it in the first century BC. The descendants of that sausage are still sold across Italy and Portugal today under names like luganega and linguiça.
What turned salted, stuffed pork into salami as we know it was something nobody at the time could see. Bacteria in the cellars and on the hands of the people making it fed on the meat's sugars and turned the mince slightly acidic, which gave it its tang and made it harder for anything harmful to grow. White mould settled on the casings and protected them. Every valley ended up with its own flora, its own spices and its own diameter, and that's why a salame from Felino tastes nothing like one from Calabria, and neither tastes like a French saucisson.
The difference today is that you don't have to rely on your cellar's luck. The same bacteria and the same white mould are sold freeze-dried, a pinch at a time. You'll meet both further down.
Making salami at home: what it actually takes
Salami isn't the first thing to make if you've never cured meat. A whole-muscle piece, like a bresaola or a lomo, forgives more. But it's closer than it looks, and the kit is smaller than most people expect.
Equipment. A meat grinder, or a butcher who'll grind for you to your plate size. A sausage stuffer; a grinder attachment works for thin sausages but the wide-mouth piston stuffers make life much easier. Casings, natural or collagen. A way to check pH if you want to be precise about fermentation. And a scale, because weight is the only honest measure of when salami is done.
Ingredients you won't have in the kitchen. A starter culture and a surface mould culture. Both come freeze-dried, both live in the freezer, and both are sold wherever sausage casings are.
A place to hang it. Somewhere dark with a little air moving: a basement, a shed, a pantry, a cool spare room. It doesn't need to be a cabinet. What it needs is to be stable, and to be watched.
Time. A day or two for fermentation and then weeks of drying, depending on the diameter. Most of that time you're doing nothing at all, which is the part people underestimate: the hard thing about salami isn't the work, it's not interfering.
If you already have a grinder and some patience, you have most of what the curing and charcuterie world asks for.
How to make salami, step by step
The order below is the order you actually work in. The exact amounts, the fermentation time and the finishing weight belong to each recipe, and they're in the recipes in the Meatdryer app. What follows is what each step is for, which is what lets you follow any recipe well.
Meat and fat, and why the fat stays cold
Most salami is pork and pork fat, but it doesn't have to be. Beef, venison, wild boar and even goose all make good salami, and leaner meats are usually mixed with pork fat so the sausage binds and dries properly. Many makers use pork shoulder with added back fat; Mikkel Borre, the Danish butcher behind the two salami recipes in the Meatdryer app, uses pork belly, which already carries the fat in the right place. The one rule that doesn't change is temperature. Fat that warms up smears: instead of staying in distinct white flecks it coats the lean, and a smeared salami binds badly and dries unevenly, because the fat seals the paths moisture needs to escape. Keep everything cold. Partly freeze the cubes before grinding, chill the grinder parts, and work fast.
Casings and diameter: start thin
The diameter of the casing decides almost everything that comes after it. A thin sausage dries in a fraction of the time of a thick one and forgives far more, because the middle is never far from the surface. A fat salami has to lose water from a centre that's a long way from the air, slowly enough that the outside doesn't dry first.
So start thin. Make a batch of snack-sized dry sausages in narrow casings, then a medium salami, and leave the wide ones, the soppressata-sized pieces, until you've watched a few batches through. Natural casings breathe and give the traditional look; collagen casings are even and easy. Either works.
Grinding and mixing: the bind
Grind cold, on the plate the recipe asks for. Mikkel goes fine for his pepperoni and coarse for his chorizo, and the difference shows in every slice. Then add the salt, sugar, spices and the dissolved starter culture, and mix until the mince turns sticky. That stickiness is the salt pulling protein out of the lean, and it's what holds the salami together as one piece rather than a tube of loose mince.
Mikkel's test: press a little mince onto your fingertips and turn your hand upside down. If it stays stuck, it's bound.
Stuffing without air pockets
Air is the enemy inside a salami. A pocket of it dries and discolours on its own schedule, and it's where trouble starts. Fill the stuffer tightly, push the mince in slowly and evenly, and prick any bubbles you see through the casing with a clean needle. Tie the ends firmly with butcher twine, leaving a loop to hang from.
Keep the scrap of mince left in the stuffer and wrap it in cling film. It's your test piece: you can check how fermentation is going on that instead of cutting into a salami.
Fermentation: starter culture and the white bloom
Two small ingredients turn a dried sausage into a salami. A starter culture is a measured dose of lactic acid bacteria, the same family that sours sourdough. Mixed into the mince with a little sugar and kept warm for the first day or two, it turns that sugar into lactic acid, which gives salami its tang and firmer bite. The old makers relied on whatever bacteria lived in their cellars; a culture gives you the good ones on purpose.
The white powder on a good salami, the French call it the fleur, is mould, and it's there on purpose too. A mould culture sprayed on after stuffing covers the casing so unwanted moulds have nowhere to land, and slows drying at the surface so the casing doesn't harden into a shell before the middle has dried. Mikkel uses Flora Italia as his starter culture and Mold 600 for the bloom, both sold freeze-dried wherever casings are.
The hang, and why steady beats fast
After fermentation, the salami goes somewhere cooler to dry. What you're managing is the speed at which water leaves. Too fast, usually from air that's too dry or moving too much, and the surface seals while the middle stays wet. Too slow, in air that's too damp, and you get unwanted mould and a salami that never firms up. The mould bloom helps, the diameter helps, but in the end it's the room.
That's why the conditions matter more than the equipment. A cellar, a garage or a spare fridge can all do this well if they're steady, and a steady cool room beats an expensive cabinet in a place that swings. Hang it in the dark, give it air, and put a protective net over it if flies can get anywhere near.
Weight, not days
Every salami recipe gives a number of weeks, and every one of them is a guess about your room. Two salamis stuffed from the same bowl and hung a metre apart can finish days apart. The one thing that tells you where a salami actually is, is how much water it has lost, and that's a weight.
That's the job the Meatdryer hook does. You hang the salami on it and it weighs it continuously, alongside the temperature and humidity, and tells you when it has reached the target weight for the recipe you're following. How far you take it is taste. Mikkel stops his pepperoni earlier than his chorizo, because pepperoni is meant to go in the oven and needs some moisture left to melt, and a chorizo for the board wants to be firmer.
Salami around the world
Once you've made one, you start noticing how differently everyone else does it. These are the ones worth knowing, and a few you might want to make next.
Italy: salame Felino, salame di Varzi and soppressata
Italy has more salami than anyone can count, and most are named after a town. Salame Felino, from the hills above Parma, is soft, delicately spiced and cut on the diagonal into long thin ovals; it carries protected IGP status. Salame di Varzi from the Oltrepò Pavese in Lombardy is coarser, fattier and aged longer, with DOP protection. Go south and the flavour turns up: soppressata from Calabria and Basilicata is pressed flat under weights while it dries, often with chilli, and is one of the salami people search for most, well beyond Italy.
France: saucisson sec, rosette de Lyon and figatellu
The French saucisson sec is simpler than most Italian salami: pork, salt, pepper, sometimes garlic, and that thick white fleur. It's the sausage of picnics and aperitifs, sliced on a board with a pocketknife. Rosette de Lyon is its bigger, finer city cousin, named after the wide end of the pig's intestine it's traditionally stuffed into. And in Corsica, figatellu is a liver sausage, smoked over chestnut and oak, made in winter when the island's pigs are slaughtered, and usually eaten grilled.
Spain: chorizo and salchichón
Spain split its dry sausages into two families by one ingredient. Chorizo is red with pimentón, Spanish paprika, which only reached Spain after Columbus, and it's what makes chorizo taste like chorizo. Mikkel's favourite is chorizo ibérico, made from the free-roaming Iberian pig that fattens on acorns in the oak forests of the south-west. Salchichón leaves out the paprika and leans on black pepper instead, and it's closer to an Italian salame than to its red cousin. Catalonia's thin fuet is the snack version of the same idea.
Germany and the Alps: Landjäger, Pfefferbeißer and Kaminwurz
The German-speaking world tends to smoke its dry sausages. Landjäger, from the south of Germany and Switzerland, are pressed into flat rectangular sticks, sold in pairs, and made to be carried in a pocket. Pfefferbeißer are the thin, peppery snack sausages you find at every Bavarian and Austrian butcher's counter. And Kaminwurz from South Tyrol and Austria take their name from the chimney they were once hung in to smoke and dry.
Sweden: spickekorv
In Swedish, spicken means salted and dried, and spickekorv is the Nordic answer to salami: a firm, often lightly smoked dry sausage, sliced thin onto crispbread.
And the American one: pepperoni
Pepperoni isn't Italian. It was born among Italian immigrants in the United States in the early twentieth century, and it's now probably the best-known salami in the world and the most-used pizza topping there is. It's fatty, spiced with paprika, chilli, fennel and anise, and deliberately left less dry than a salami for the board, because the moisture and the fat are what make it cup and crisp in the oven.
Recipes to start with in the Meatdryer app
The Meatdryer app already has two salami recipes by Mikkel Borre, with everything you need to make them: the exact spice mix per kilo, the grind, how to wake the starter culture and the mould, the fermentation, the temperature and humidity to hang at, and the weight to stop at. They're a good pair to start with, because they teach the same method from two directions.
Mikkel is a Danish cook, butcher and sausage maker, trained in restaurant kitchens and old-school butcher shops, including a century-old butchery on the island of Funen. What he's good at is making a technique that sounds complicated feel like something you'd try on a Saturday.
Pizza Night Pepperoni is his answer to not having room for a smoker in an apartment: smoked paprika carries the smokiness instead, and if you want more, smoked sea salt does the rest. It's finely ground, fatty but not greasy, and stopped early so it bakes well.
Pimentón Chorizo is coarser and drier, built around Pimentón de la Vera. The recipe leaves the heat to you: sweet, bittersweet or hot. Mikkel usually goes sweet, so he can taste everything else in it.
Hang either one on a Meatdryer hook, pick the recipe in the app, and it follows the weight down day by day and tells you the moment the salami reaches its target. No guessing at weeks, no cutting one open to check.
Salami from your own game
If you hunt, the fat question changes. Venison, moose and roe deer are lean, far leaner than pork, and a dry sausage from game almost always needs pork fat added to bind and to dry properly. We've covered curing and drying wild game separately, including sausage from your own animal and where to start if you're working from the carcass.
One note on curing salt, since it comes up in every conversation about salami: whether to use a nitrite curing salt, and how much, is a question of its own. We'd rather answer it properly, with sources, than in a passing sentence here.
Before you start
Always wear gloves and keep strict hygiene when you handle, stuff and hang meat. Keep the mince cold throughout. Use a protective net to keep flies and insects away, and hang the meat somewhere dark and well ventilated. Follow a tested recipe for the salt, the culture and the target weight, and don't cut corners on any of them. And if something on the salami doesn't look like the white bloom you seeded, find out what it is before you eat it.
All cooking and meat handling is done at your own risk.
Shop the essentials
Everything you need to hang, dry and know when your salami is ready.
- Meatdryer Hook – Uses recipes, temperature, humidity and weight to tell you exactly when your salami is ready.
- Butcher Twine – Ties off the casing and gives you a strong loop to hang from.
- Protective Net – Keeps flies and insects off while it dries.
- Accessory Hook – Hang more than one salami from a single Meatdryer.
