Venanzi22

Love polenta----ultimate comfort food. Quick tip if you haven,t Made it from the box. Measure out the amount you want, put it in a bowl or large cup and add enough cold water to give it a drench----enough to moisten, but not make soupy. This will keep it from getting clumpy { which is easy to happen if it is introduced dry into boiling water. Favorite topping is pasta meat sauce cut into the polenta and topped with grated Romano cheese (gone to heaven)

I am using a PH meter and initially made a slurry of 50 grams of meat and 50 grams filtered water. I recalibrated the meter with a 7.0 solution and tried it out on a slurry of commercial salume. It registered down to 5.1 so I know the meter is working. I also tried making one of the slurries from 20 grams of meat and 2 grams of previously boiled tap water----did not seem to make a difference.

Hi Folks, Glad to be a part of this forum. In reference to the PH level for fermented salume, I have a puzzlement! I am hoping someone out there has an answer. I am fermenting two 20 pd recipes of soppressata salume. the initial PH on batch one was 6.2---24 hours later it had dropped to 5.4. 23 hours later it was 5.3---another 23 hours later it was still 5.3. 24 later it had moved up to 5.7. Another 24 hours and it was 6.1. Should I be concerned? Batch two did the same thing----it moved from 6.4 to 5.7 to 5.4 for 48 hours then up to 5.6 and 5.7???? I took heart from your comment about the color of the meat----mine is red and looks like the batch I made last season----it smells wonderful and is tightening up nicely in my wine shed. It is the11th day since I began. I thought that once the lowest PH level was reached, that it would stay there. Why is it moving up? Also, since it did not go below 5.3 on batch one and 5.4 on batch two, Am I doing something wrong? Thank you for whatever help you can provide.