This is a top round roast. Generally, a somewhat bland, lean, boring piece of beef. I thought it would be a good candidate for bresaola. Bresaola is a delicious salumi. No, I’m not spelling it wrong. It’s not salami. Salami is to hamburger what salumi is to a roast. Whole muscle, cured, spiced, and dried. In the process, I picked up the wrong bacteria and the whole project went south.

Let’s look at what went wrong:

Here it is, cured and trussed. It had been salted in the cold store for about 2 weeks and then soaked in some red wine to remove the excess herbs and salt.

Here’s the pork entrée, getting a quick rinse in some white wine. The wine gives the meat a nice flavor and really helps to bring the salt levels down. I think the alcohol kills a good bit of bacteria, fortifying the meat to go into the curing chamber.

Conditions are perfect. 65 degrees F. 75% humidity. These will slowly dry in the curing chamber. Cuts this size should take 7-10 weeks to lose 30% of their initial weight to water loss. After a couple of days, I mixed up a solution of Bactoferm™ F–RM–52 and gave the meat a good spritz.

Here they are three days after culturing.

Failure!! These both need to go in the bin! You can see the overgrowth of blue mold, speckled with brown and black. This is dangerously contaminated!

Once I evacuate the meat from the curing chamber, I will use a 20% solution of Clorox Bleach to swab the curing box down and then expose the whole thing to direct sunlight for a week to decontaminate and aerate.

Yes, this was an expensive failure (cost of the meat). But, overall, I think we learned a lot and this will never happen again.

The solution is in the comments below.