CDC

I had the same problem (too soft) the first time I tried duck prosciutto. I was using wild duck and thought that since they are so much drier to start with (wild waterfowl can be totally unlike the domestic birds) I should take great care not to over-dry them. Oops. The silver lining to that cloud was that the too-soft meat was wonderful when cooked up with some white beans, a few herbs, and good duck stock! In fact, as far as I'm concerned it might be worth doing it again just for that purpose.

Michael, that's a good suggestion about vaporizing off the alcohol first, especially in a situation like this where it's in contact for days rather than hours. Thanks! Like many of the others here, I recently acquired your Charcuterie book. For many years I've acquired or at least examined every book I could find with material on the subject, and yours is one of the few (maybe 5% or so?) that has any significant amount of original (i.e., non-obvious) content. I think that down the road it could end up being viewed as a fairly important book in the popular culinary history of these years. Seriously. I think the hot-smoked bacon idea is pretty interesting. I've always cold-smoked it, and would never have thought to try the other -- but I'm going to do so now... re the Ziplocs, I'd be afraid to put the cure directly on a hotel pan as Pallee does (especially an aluminum one) or any other reactive surface for fear that I'd end up with metal in my meat. Aluminum is very conductive and so corrodes readily (ever had an aluminum boat in salt water with no zincs protecting the hull?) and in fact is sometimes used as anode material to protect brine tanks in industry. Not very appetizing; thanks anyway. I usually use food-grade plastic containers, or ceramic or glass if the meat fits in one.

For bresaola, I think you're right about the eye of round. That's what I've been using (now on my second batch) and it seems just about perfect both in size and leanness. My recipe is pretty similar to yours except that I include some red wine, which probably deepens the flavor and works nicely with some of the other ingredients. The raw ingredients are pictured at http://larder.blogspot.com/ . The outside is very hard after hanging for three or four weeks, though. I've hung hams for several months that were still less hard than this beef. It's not so bad as to be case-hardened, and the inside is perfectly fine all the way through, but could a too-dry environment be responsible for the extreme outer hardness? Could the acidity of the wine be a factor?