Homemade pepperoni

The Italian sausage turned out pretty good, so I thought I might as well make some of my own pepperoni also!  After doing some recipe research online, I settled on one to start with and made a minor modification.  The recipe I used is...

1 lb ground beef
1 1/2 tsp Morton's Tender Quick
1 tsp liquid smoke (omit if you intend to naturally smoke the pepperoni)
3/4 tsp fresh ground black pepper
3/4 tsp sweet paprika
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
1/4 tsp anise seeds
1/4 tsp granulated garlic

The Tender Quick was a little tricky to find, my normal grocery stores didn't stock the product.  Luckily, the Morton Salt webpage has a product locator you can use to find out who sells what in your area.  The product locator pointed me to a grocery store named Strack and Van Til located at 2627 N. Elston Ave. in Chicago.  I'd been by this grocery store many times when going to Micro Center, but never actually gone in.  It's a pretty nice place with a HUGE produce section.  Anyway, after grabbing the Tender Quick I also picked up some of the spices.  The recipes I looked at while researching pepperoni suggested using ground beef with no more than 15% fat content.  I picked up a small package (1.5 lbs) of 85/15 ground beef and headed home to start making sausage!

After making the Italian sausage, I thought it would be a good idea to crack the whole spices this time.  I measured out all of the seeds, peppercorns and crushed red pepper (increasing the amounts by 50% for the extra 1/2 pound of beef) and ran them through the coffee grinder I use as a spice mill.  The cracked spices, powdered spices and the liquid smoke were added to the ground beef and mixed throughly.  This would probably be easier done with a stand mixer, but I didn't want to clean up another thing for such a small amount of sausage.


The next step is to allow the meat mixture to chill for a while in the fridge, this makes forming the rolls easier but can be skipped if you're in a hurry and don't mind being a little messy.

To make the rolls I put a piece of plastic wrap on the counter and placed a portion of the meat mixture on top.  The meat was formed in to a loose log shape and then I started rolling it up in the plastic wrap until I had a nice, round log o' meat.  To force the meat in to a more compact shape I twisted the ends of the plastic wrap using a rotating motion with my wrists to force the meat in to a more compact log and force out as much air as possible, then the ends were tucked under to prevent the plastic wrap from loosening.  These were allowed to chill for 24 hours in the refrigerator.

The next day when I made it home from work I set the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit pulled the pepperoni rolls out of the refrigerator.  I set up a half sheet pan with a wire rack, it's important that the fat be allowed to drain away from the sausage as it renders out.  Since the uncooked pepperoni was still a little soft I initially placed it on strips of parchment paper to prevent it from sticking to the rack.  After an hour when it was time for the first turn the pepperoni was firm and had coated with rendered fat, i rolled the rolls off the parchment directly on to the rack.  This seemed to work perfectly.


While I was looking at recipes online, I found quite a few that had the same ingredient list but with wildly varying cooking times.  Some called for 8 hours at 200 degrees while others only cooked for one hour at 375 degrees.  Since I didn't want to be up til the wee hours of the morning playing with my peperoni, I decided to go convection at 200 degrees, then increase the temp to 225 after a few hours.  The total cooking time was around 5 hours with the rolls being turned about every hour or so.  Since the temperature was so low this could easily be done with my bare fingers.

 When I removed the pepperoni rolls from the oven I used paper towels to pat the remaining fat off the surface.  The surface of the rolls was a little sticky at this point, so I used a pepper mill to coat thew outside with a little more black pepper.  The pepperoni was allowed to cool for a little bit, then placed in the refrigerator on a rack to chill completely.

I sliced some pepperoni off one of the rolls the next morning when I woke up.  Pepperoni is, after all, the breakfast of champions.  The sausage was dry, firm and the surface tackiness that was present when it came out of the oven was gone.  I was able to cut some very thin slices with my santoku knife and finally taste the results of three days effort.  The resulting pepperoni is fairly spicy with much less fat present than the commercial versions I'm used to buying in the supermarket.  It tastes like, well, pepperoni.  This holiday weekend I plan on making a pizza with homemade pepperoni and the homemade Italian sausage from last week.  So far I've made fresh and dried/cured sausages, I've been looking in to fermented sausages like Spanish chorizo but that will have to wait until another day...