Salami

On curing the meats I have been watching videos on sausages and salami's. What has put me off with these is getting the skins, also mincing the meat and pushing it into the tubes. In fact, it all seemed a little complicated.
My specific issue was trying to find out where I could get my hands on some skins. And that is not that simple either as to do you use natural or man-made skins?
On looking online there are skins on offer, of both sorts, in NZ. Trade Me seems to have a few listings and there are a couple of boutique suppliers. An issue I have is the quantities, I don't want to buy a massive anmount just to find i'm not interested in taking it further, so I want to buy some skins in small quantities.
At the end there were a couple of places and i chose the Christchurch Oskar butchers to order online from. Their delivery was cheaper than the Boutique in Auckland, for them the cost of delivery was more expensive than the small product I wanted to purchase. I only wanted to purchase a small amount to try. I got them at Oskar Butchers. 
So I thought I'd try the simplist one which is fibrous Salami Casings 50mm dia and there are 5 of them. Here is the link to what I'm getting :
https://oskarbutcher.co.nz/product/fibrous-salami-casings/
One thing I noted about the casings was that they have holes in to allow the air/moisture to escape from the meat inside.
I got an email with a link to some recipes, which is a nice touch:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q6AQVxFelBcmlN_Dum8jZOlY54hsDNVd1udfnCsxLDU
Also one for making your own cold smoker:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gDs416oEJFLJGil5JuPPGuvNnW4GINoZXAsPoiflFrk

 So I'll wait for the skins and give it a try. I'm interested in hanging them in the Biltong box and also in the fridge. 
The cool italian dude has a few sausage and salami videos and I'll watch them before I make the salami. 
It seems with the salami tyou use a mix of meats so you may need to grind your meats up. There are these types of grinders on Trade Me for about $60 + Delivery (8-10$). They will do the sausage stuffing too with attachments.

 I intend to try out the Salami making manually first of all, and if that works out well I may plan to move onto making sausages and outher skinned meats.

11th March

The skins came yesterday. They are about 50mm diameter & about 400mm long, a bit longer but you have to tie the ends. There are 5 of them.

I've been watching videos on how to make salami, I quite like the mixture in this video, it looks pretty straightforward.

 INGREDIENTS:
 - minced shoulder of pork (2.5kg) 
- 3% salt to the weight of the meat (75g) 
- chilli (30g) - cracked black peppercorns 40g
- orange zest (1 orange) 
- 350ml wine 
- sausage casings


I started to look at how much meat I'd need to fill a single casing.
So using Pi x R Squared (area of a circle) x 400mm long to get volume I get .75l (or .00075m3)

Then I went looking for the density of pork mince, which is not easy to find, there are some variations.
So I have a litre volume, but need to relate to a weight, so density is what is needed.
I seem to have a number about 1033kg/m3  for pork mince so slightly higher than water of 1000kg/m3
So slightly higher than the weight of water, so if I need .75kg of water I'll need about .8kg of mince.
That seems a bit excessive for a simgle salami. I think I may have my maths wrong.

The other thing that is a bit daunting is getting the sausage meat into the casing. I'll have to use a spoon and maybe the top cut off the top of a bottle to act as a funnel.
I may just have to go with his recipe and weights and see how many I fill.