>
Article snippet: When you slice into a salami, you are enjoying the fruits of some very small organisms’ labor. Like other dried sausages, salami is a fermented food. Its production involves a period where manufacturers allow microbes to work on the ground meat filling to create a bouquet of pungent, savory molecules. Traditionally, the bugs find their way to the sausage from the surrounding environment. But these days, industrial manufacturers add a starter culture of bacteria to the meat instead, much the way a bread baker adds a packet of yeast to her dough. It’s safer this way, and leads to more consistent results. These industrial starters may not always yield the most inspired flavor, though. A recent study from researchers at the University of Turin, published in the journal Applied Environmental Microbiology, found that salami made with wild bugs scored higher with tasters than salami made with a starter culture. The amount of acid produced by the industrial bacteria as it works over the meat might explain the difference. At the beginning of the experiment, Luca Cocolin, a professor of microbiology at University of Turin, and his colleagues had a local salami manufacturer create two batches, using pork, lard, pepper, coriander, nutmeg, wine and other ingredients according to their usual recipe. A starter was added to one batch and not to the other, and after the filling was packed into sausage casings and hung up to ferment, the researchers checked in on the microbes thre... Link to the full article to read more