I don’t have any photos because my little camera isn’t really good enough to show the progress of the pancetta, but I can assure you that it is a much happier piece of raw meat since I’ve been running the swamp cooler to up the humidity down there.
Ruhlman’s recipe says that the drying pancetta should be “firm and pliable but not hard” — before I upped the humidity, it was getting a little hard. Now it seems happier somehow, can’t really explain it but it isn’t drying out at quite the rate it was, and where early last week I thought I’d only be able to hang it for a week, now I think it can go the full two.
So, that’s the pancetta update. It still smells lovely. I poke at it every day or so to make sure nothing untoward seems to be happening. So far, so good.
