My quest to find a decent truffle salame in the United States began about 10 years ago after having a very tasty “Salame al Tartufo” in Italy and another several years later in London. tartufo-4 In the last few years there have been several US salame makers hopping on the truffle fad bandwagon that have produced a truffle salame. Unfortunately, none that I have had thus far are that good, mainly because they are lacking in truffle flavor. This is probably due to the fact that real truffles are expensive and most truffle products such as truffle oil, and truffle salt contain little or no real truffle in them. Although the Salame al Tartufo is not a traditional Italian salame it is nonetheless delicious if made correctly. A few months ago I hopped on the bandwagon myself and decided to make my own Salame al Tartufo from scratch. Having no recipe to use as a guide I started out with a basic salame that I had made before and modified it for the use of several truffle products.

Here is my Salame al Tartufo recipe:

2270g Pork Shoulder
340g Pork Fat (Fatback)
44g Urbani Black Truffle Salt
13.5g Glucose
7g Cure #2
2.8g White Pepper
2g Whole Black Peppercorn’s
2 tbs Red Wine (I used 100% Sangiovese)
2 tsp Tiberio Roncuzzi Crema di Tartufo
B-LC-007 Starter Culture

The ever so fun job of washing the beef middles was accomplished the night before and

the dry ingredients were mixed and set aside. The next day after cooling and partially freezing the pork I ground the cubed fatback and shoulder using my KitchenAid mixer grinder attachment with the large grinding die. I then mixed the pork and spices together and added the wine and two teaspoons of minced black truffle last. Unlike the truffle salt that I used, the minced black summer truffle from Tiberio Roncuzzi I added was especially fragrant. They are one of the only producers I know of that actually uses real truffles in their truffle products and it made a big difference in my salame.

Here is a picture of the product:

Crema-di-Tartufo1

The only thing better than this would have been to use a fresh whole black summer truffle, or of course If I wanted to produce the worlds most expensive salame, a white one!

After mixing the meat and spice mixture for several minutes I added the starter culture (B-LC-007) and continued mixing until it was evenly distributed. I stuffed all of the meat paste into 55-60 mm natural beef middles from Butcher & Packer

and fermented at 73° and 90 % humidity for 48 hours. The salame was then dipped in Mold 600 Bactoferm and left to cure at 55° and 70% humidity for almost two months. My Salame al Tartufo came out looking excellent, and all of my friends really liked it. I think the salame was lacking a bit in truffle flavor and saltiness. On my next batch I will probably omit the truffle salt, switch back to regular salt and double the minced tartufo.

Here is the finished Salame al Tartufo :

tartufo-2