Curing & Fermentation Chamber

As I got started making different types of charcuterie I quickly saw my needs grow as the variety of types of things I wanted to make also grew. When I was just making smaller batches of air-dried items I was able to get by sufficiently with a place to hang items in my kitchen or pantry. That required some creativity to help maintain air-circulation and proper humidity. While most of my projects turned out well, they were never as good as I wanted them to be. Most of the trouble I ran into was maintaining a relative-humidity that allowed the meats to dry at a slow and steady rate. Case-hardening is an issue. If the items dry too quickly the outside can lose moisture while the inside doesn't. When the weight loss is too quick it doesn't allow proper changes throughout the meat to take place that lead to taste development through enzymatic changes that require a longer timeframe. So after having made several items that suffered in one way or another, mostly from these issues, I was ready for a better, yet affordable way to fix these problems and maintain success with other important aspects like temperature and air circulation.

Chamber ready to go to work.

The over-all chamber is what I would refer to as medium sized. It takes up a footprint of 18" X 48". The size is that of the InterMetro Rack that houses everything. It is 74.5" tall. I bought the black Metro rack for about $150 at The Container Store. It comes with four shelves, a top, the two middle shelves and a bottom. I arranged it so that the top is flush, the bottom is a notch or two off the bottom and the two middle shelved are equally spaced between top and bottom.

Equipment: home-made custom drying rack.

When I finally found a place to do my drying in a more controlled manner, I wanted to have a versatile drying rack for whatever I may decide to do. It also needed to fit into the "long-closet" type of room I was being allowed to use. So I was able to get a general idea to size, shape and placement of the to-be-built rack. I drew up a nice drawing using the skills I acquired in my High School drafting classes, back when you still used pencil and paper to make said drawings. Then off I went to Home Depot to grab up the supplies. It all came to about $80 with tax.

I wanted to be able to dry anything from small sausages to full hams, but had to keep it under 2 feet deep. I wanted to use dowels to hang the meats from, either strung up, or directly on them (i.e. polish sausages). I also wanted to keep it neat and not leave my kind friends' closet a mess or attract unwanted guests with floor drippings. So I designed this to hold a commercial sheet tray on the bottom. It's easily removed and cleaned. Once I got to my friends' place and showed them the plans, we checked it against the space. To increase the ease of passage to the things in the back of this space, I reduced this by 3 inches in depth. It will still easily hold the sheet tray, it just doesn't nestle down perfectly into the base, no biggie.