Pancetta

Need I say more? Of course, that's a lot of pancetta but I'll use it. In the meantime, much of it is frozen in convenient packages.

This was really the brainchild of my husband. He wanted to make pancetta. Since I'm the chef in the family, I had to rain on his parade. I think he deserved that for so often hogging my book, Charcuterie, by Ruhlman and Polcyn.

We followed the recipe in the book exactly. I worried about the humidity, so I quickly ordered a hygrometer and calibrator online. We have a building outside that houses a pool table and some exercise equipment so we decided to use that as our place to hang the pancetta. We set the heat at 55F, and made sure the hygrometer measured around 60% humidity. It hung for two weeks and this is the result.

It's delicious! Luckily we rolled and tied it very tightly so mold did not become a problem. I never knew pancetta could taste even better than what the Italian deli in Spokane has. This is the way to go.