Every one of the meats below was invented by someone who had no choice. There was a pig, or a deer, or a whole reindeer, and there was no way to keep it. What they had was salt, wind, cold, smoke and time. Out of that constraint came prosciutto, biltong, pastırma and the rest.
What is worth noticing is how differently the same problem got solved. A Spanish village and a Swedish one both had cold winters and both had meat to preserve, and one of them produced a ham aged for three years while the other produced something you slice thin and eat on a mountainside. Geography wrote the recipes. The salt came from a particular mine, the wind came off a particular valley, and the results are still local enough that a Piedmontese salami and a Lombard one are not the same food.
This is a tour of those traditions, country by country. Some of them you can make at home more easily than you would think. A few of them you cannot make at home at all, and it is worth knowing which is which.
Italy — the longest apprenticeship
Italy has more named cured meats than any other country, and the reason is not that Italians are better at it. It is that Italy stayed a collection of regions for a very long time, each with its own salt supply, its own climate, and no particular interest in what the next valley was doing. That fragmentation is preserved in the products.
Prosciutto crudo
The famous one is Prosciutto di Parma, made from selected hind legs, salted and aged for twelve to thirty-six months. The Apennine air moving through the curing rooms is doing the work: pulling moisture out slowly enough that the ham never hardens, concentrating sweetness as it goes. Sliced properly it is translucent. Sliced badly it is a waste of two years.
Culatello
Culatello is what happens when you take the best muscle out of the prosciutto leg and cure that alone, in the river fog of the Bassa Parmense. It is the most expensive Italian cured meat and the one most often described as the finest. It is also the least reproducible outside its home; the fog is genuinely part of the recipe.
Speck Alto Adige
Speck is the Alps arguing with the Mediterranean. It is lightly seasoned with juniper and bay, cold-smoked, and then air-dried in mountain air, which is the northern European instinct and the southern one applied to the same piece of pork. The result is leaner and firmer than prosciutto, smoky without being a smoked product.
Bresaola della Valtellina
Beef, not pork. Salted, lightly spiced, aged in the cold of the Valtellina. Bresaola is the entry point for a lot of people because it is lean, unfussy and forgiving, and because beef is easier to source than a whole pork leg. If you are going to make one Italian cured meat, make this one.
Coppa and capocollo
Both words describe the same cut — the pork neck and shoulder muscle, one of the best-marbled pieces on the animal, rubbed with pepper and wine and dried for months. Coppa is the northern name and capocollo the southern one, and depending on where you are standing one of them sounds wrong. The fat is the point: it is distributed through the muscle rather than around it, so a slice looks like marble and behaves like butter.
Lonzino
Lonzino is cured pork loin, and it is the one on this list I would push a beginner towards hardest. It is a single lean muscle, an even shape, no bone, no casing to tie: salt it, spice it, hang it, wait. There is very little that can go wrong that will not announce itself early. It is also the least famous thing in this section, which is a shame, because it is genuinely good and it is the fastest way to learn what curing actually feels like.
Guanciale
Cured pork cheek. It is fattier than pancetta, more intensely porky, and it is the correct fat for carbonara and amatriciana no matter what a recipe substituting pancetta tells you. It renders differently, slower and cleaner, and the difference is obvious the first time you make the swap in the other direction.
Pancetta
Pork belly, cured with salt and pepper and often garlic or bay, then either rolled tight or left flat. Rolled looks better and takes longer; flat dries more evenly and is easier to get right. Pancetta is the other genuinely beginner-friendly project here, and unlike most of this list it earns its keep in cooking as well as on a board.
Salami, region by region
Italian salami is not one product. Tuscany's finocchiona is heavy with fennel, a habit that started because fennel was cheaper than pepper. Milanese salami is fine-grained and restrained. Salame Felino, from the hills near Parma, is sweet and soft and barely spiced. Salame di Varzi is coarser and more assertive. Each of them reflects what grew locally and what came up the trade road.
Salami is also where a lot of first attempts go wrong, because a sausage has to be filled evenly and tied so that it hangs straight and dries at the same rate along its length. Tie it properly with butcher twine and you have removed most of the ways it can fail.
Lardo di Colonnata
Pure back fat, layered with herbs into marble basins in a village above Carrara and left for months. It sounds like a dare and eats like something between prosciutto and butter. Worth knowing about even if you never make it.
Spain — wind off the mountains
Spanish curing is built almost entirely around natural airflow. The secaderos, the curing houses in the mountain villages, work by opening and closing shutters as the weather changes, which is a way of saying that a Spanish curer spends years learning to read humidity by feel.
That is the part of this craft that used to take a lifetime to learn and is now measurable. A Meatdryer hook tracks temperature, humidity and weight loss on the piece itself, which is the same information the shutters were being adjusted for, just legible without the decades.
Jamón ibérico
From Iberian pigs, the best of them finished on acorns, air-dried for years. The intramuscular fat renders slowly at cellar temperature and never fully sets again, which is why a good slice looks slightly wet and why it tastes of far more than pork. It is the most expensive cured meat in Europe and the argument for it is not marketing.
Jamón serrano
White pigs, high-altitude curing rooms, less time. Serrano means "from the mountains". It is firmer, drier and saltier than ibérico, and it is the ham Spain actually eats day to day.
Lomo embuchado
Dry-cured pork loin, seasoned with pimentón, garlic and rosemary and cased. The loin is so lean that the drying has to be gentle or it turns to leather. When it works it is dense, mild and slightly smoky from the paprika.
Chorizo curado
The air-dried version, not the fresh cooking one. Pork, pimentón, garlic, oregano. The colour and much of the flavour come from the paprika, traditionally dried over oak, and the difference between a smoked pimentón and a sweet one changes the sausage completely.
Salchichón
Spain's peppercorn salami, with no paprika, which is what separates it from chorizo. It is cleaner and more herbal, and it tends to be the one Spaniards reach for when they want to taste the pork rather than the seasoning.
Fuet
Catalan, thin, fast-drying, usually with a white bloom of mould on the outside that you eat along with it. Fuet dries in weeks rather than months because of its diameter, which makes it one of the more achievable dry sausages for someone starting out.
Sobrasada
Mallorcan, and the odd one out — a cured sausage soft enough to spread. The high pimentón content and the island's mild humidity keep it from ever firming up. You spread it on bread and put it under the grill, and it does not resemble anything else on this list.
Cecina de León
Spain's dried beef: salted, lightly smoked, aged for months, dark and mineral in a way that beef usually is not. It sits somewhere near bresaola but heavier and smokier. Note the name. It comes back later, meaning something rather different in Argentina.
France — and Corsica, which is its own country about this
French charcuterie went from preservation to gastronomy earlier than most, and it shows in the balance. Less smoke than Germany, less salt than Spain, more attention to texture than either.
Saucisson sec
Pork, salt, pepper, garlic, sometimes wine, dried slowly in a cool cellar. The national snack, and the sausage most French households would recognise blindfolded.
Jambon de Bayonne
Salted with mineral-rich salt from the Adour basin and dried in mild Atlantic wind. Sweeter and creamier than a mountain ham, because the drying is gentler and the winter is not as hard.
Rosette de Lyon
A large-diameter salami, simply seasoned, dried long. The diameter is the whole point: the bigger the sausage, the slower and more even the drying, and the smoother the texture at the end.
Magret séché
Dried duck breast. Salted, hung for a few weeks, sliced thin. It is the quickest genuinely impressive thing on this entire list, and if you have never cured anything, this is a good first attempt because the piece is small and the timescale is short enough to keep you interested.
Filet mignon séché
Dried pork tenderloin, the French cousin of lonzino, and just as forgiving. A single small muscle, no casing, no tying. In France it is a common home project for exactly that reason.
Figatellu, lonzu and prisuttu — Corsica
Corsica deserves its own paragraph because its charcuterie is made from a different animal. The island's pigs are semi-wild and eat chestnuts and acorns, and the meat tastes like it. Figatellu is a liver sausage, eaten fresh and grilled in winter or dried into something much more intense. Lonzu is the cured loin, prisuttu the ham, and the best of them come from Castagniccia, the chestnut country. If you have only eaten mainland French charcuterie, none of this will taste the way you expect.
Germany, Austria and the Alps
German curing grew up in forests and highlands where cold smoke was reliable and dry mountain air was not always available. The house style is restraint: not too salty, not too smoky, and precise.
One clarification worth making, because it catches people out: Mettwurst and Teewurst are fermented and spreadable, not dried. They belong to a different family than everything else in this section.
Schwarzwälder Schinken
Black Forest ham — salted, seasoned with juniper and garlic, cold-smoked over fir and pine, then air-dried. The dark exterior is smoke, not char. It is the most recognisable German cured meat and one of the few with protected status.
Katenschinken and Rohschinken
Rohschinken is the general term for raw cured ham, and Katenschinken, "cottage ham", is the northern German version, cold-smoked over beechwood in a chimney for months. Firmer and smokier than a southern ham, and traditionally the thing a farmhouse made once a year.
Landjäger and Pfefferbeißer
Landjäger is pressed into flat squared links so it fits a coat pocket, smoked and dried until it is shelf-stable. Trail food, and still the best argument for a dried sausage that has ever been made. Pfefferbeißer is its peppery cousin, thinner and sharper. Both are semi-dried rather than fully dried, which is why they stay chewy rather than going hard.
Kaminwurzen
South Tyrolean and Austrian, "chimney sausage": short, flat, cold-smoked in the chimney and hung to dry. It is the Alpine answer to Landjäger, and the South Tyrol makes both, which tells you something about where that border sits culturally.
Bündnerfleisch
Swiss, from Graubünden, and one of the most disciplined cured meats anywhere: lean beef pressed flat repeatedly during drying so it ends up rectangular and dense, sliced almost transparently thin. The French-speaking side of Switzerland calls it viande des Grisons. Air, salt, altitude and no smoke at all.
Sweden and the north
In the Swedish north, drying was not a craft choice, it was February. Cold, dry air with almost no humidity in it will preserve meat with very little help, and the tradition reflects that: light on spice, heavy on the quality of what went in.
Torkat renkött and souvas
Dried reindeer is a Sámi staple: sliced thin, salted, hung in cold wind until it is deep red and concentrated. Souvas is the smoked version, salted and cold-smoked over birch, and either eaten as it is or sliced into a pan. Reindeer has a natural sweetness that survives drying better than most game, and the texture ends up somewhere between jerky and prosciutto.
Älgkött
Dried elk is the other northern staple and, for a Swedish hunter, the most obvious thing in the world to do with part of the animal. Elk is very lean and very clean-tasting, which makes it excellent for drying and unforgiving of being rushed. Venison (hjortkött) and wild boar behave the same way.
Game dried outdoors or in an outbuilding needs protecting from flies, which is the one problem the old racks and the modern method solve the same way. A protective net does the job without stopping the airflow that is doing the drying.
Spickekorv and the spekemat family
Spickekorv is Swedish dried sausage: coarse, beef-and-pork, lightly smoked, aged for months. It belongs to the wider Nordic spekemat tradition of salted and air-dried meat that runs across Sweden and Norway, and it is the northern equivalent of a salami without any of the Mediterranean spicing.
The United States — frontier, and the hunter's tradition
American drying has two roots that eventually met: Indigenous preservation of bison and venison by sun and smoke, and European farm curing brought over and adapted. The first produced jerky and pemmican, the second produced country ham.
Beef jerky
Thin strips, marinated or dry-rubbed, dried at low heat. It is the simplest thing on this list and the most customisable, which is exactly why the commercial version is usually disappointing and the homemade one usually is not.
Venison, bison and elk
Game is better suited to drying than beef, because the fat content is low and fat is what goes rancid. Venison jerky in particular is the standard thing to do with the trimmings and the tougher cuts, and the backstrap, the hunter's word for the loin, is good enough to deserve better than jerky. Treat it as a lonzino and cure it whole.
Country ham
From the American South: salt-cured, hung and aged for six to twenty-four months, and much saltier than its European relatives because the climate demanded it. Comparisons to jamón or prosciutto are common and slightly unfair in both directions. It is its own thing, and it is meant to be cooked rather than eaten raw.
The new American charcuterie
A generation of small producers has been putting Old World method against American ingredients for about twenty years now — fennel salami, bourbon-cured ham, chile-cured loins. Some of it is gimmick and some of it is genuinely good, and the ratio is improving.
Further afield
South Africa — biltong and droëwors
Biltong is beef or game marinated in vinegar and coriander, then air-dried in thick pieces rather than thin strips. The vinegar is the difference that matters: it acidifies the surface at the start, which is what allows biltong to be dried whole and sliced afterwards. That, plus the absence of heat and sugar, is what separates biltong from jerky. Jerky is cooked dry in thin strips and usually sweetened; biltong is air-dried in the round and is not. Droëwors is the sausage version, dried until it snaps.
Turkey — pastırma
Cured beef, pressed, air-dried, and coated in çemen, a fenugreek, garlic and paprika paste that seals the surface and perfumes the meat. The story that it began with Central Asian horsemen curing meat under the saddle is probably more legend than history, but the pressing is real and it is what gives pastırma its dense, sliceable texture.
China — la rou and lap cheong
La rou is pork belly marinated in soy, sugar and spice and dried in cold winter sun. Lap cheong is the sweet, rose-wine-scented sausage hung in kitchen windows. Both are winter foods, both are cooked before eating rather than sliced raw, and both are drying traditions that never went through a European salt-and-cellar phase.
Japan — katsuobushi
Skipjack tuna, simmered, smoked repeatedly over weeks, then inoculated with mould and dried until it is one of the hardest foods in the world — hard enough that it is shaved on a plane. It is the outer limit of what drying can do to a protein, and the umami it produces is the base of Japanese cooking.
Korea — yukpo
Beef marinated in soy, sugar, sesame and ginger, then dried until chewy rather than brittle. Traditionally a ceremonial and gift food rather than an everyday one.
Peru — charqui
Alpaca and llama meat dried in the thin, cold, dry air of the Andes. The word came into Spanish and then into English, which is where jerky comes from. So the American frontier tradition is, etymologically, an Andean one.
Argentina — cecina
Confusingly, this is not the same as Spanish cecina. Argentine cecina is thinly sliced beef, seasoned with herbs or chilli and dried until firm, closer to a spiced dried beef than to León's smoked, months-aged version. The same word, two continents, two different foods.
Portugal — presunto
Portugal's dry-cured ham, from Chaves in the north or the Alentejo in the south. The Alentejo version comes from black Iberian pigs and is very close to Spanish ibérico; the Chaves version is leaner and cured in mountain cold. Both are underrated, largely because Spain is next door.
Norway — fenalår
Cured leg of lamb, salted, sometimes smoked, and dried for months. Mutton and lamb are almost absent from the rest of this list, which makes fenalår unusual — and it is the centrepiece of a Norwegian Christmas table for good reason.
What all of them have in common
Strip away the regional detail and every tradition here is doing the same three things: adding salt so that water leaves the meat and unwanted bacteria cannot thrive, removing moisture steadily so that the outside never dries faster than the inside can follow, and giving it enough time for the flavour to change into something the fresh meat never had.
The variables are the same everywhere too: salt, temperature, humidity, airflow and time. The reason a Spanish curer opened and closed shutters and a Swedish one hung meat outdoors in February is that both were managing the same five things with the tools they had.
Doing it at home
Quite a lot of this list is achievable in a domestic space. Magret séché, lonzino, filet mignon séché, bresaola, pancetta and fuet are all realistic first projects: small pieces, single muscles or fast-drying sausages, on timescales measured in weeks. Prosciutto, culatello and jamón are not, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
The honest caution: these are old methods, and they work because the salt, the temperature and the airflow are right, not because they are traditional. Follow a tested recipe rather than improvising one, and give the meat the time the recipe asks for rather than the time you would prefer. Every recipe in the Meatdryer app carries its own cure and its own target weight loss, and the hook tells you when the piece has actually reached it, which is the one thing the old curers had to learn by hand over about thirty years.
Start with one piece. Pick something small. The tradition you end up with will be your own version of a very old argument between salt, air and patience.
Shop the essentials
Everything you need to start curing and drying at home.
- Meatdryer Hook – Uses recipes, temperature, humidity and weight to tell you exactly when your meat is ready.
- Meatdryer Artisan Kit – Our premium kit, with everything needed for your first project in one box.
- Butcher Twine – Ties and hangs a piece straight so it dries evenly along its length.
- Protective Net – Keeps insects off without restricting the airflow that does the drying.
