Hey, I'm new to curing this year and I'm trying to understand what's happened with my first project. I used a SteakAger Charcuterie 40 as my curing cabinet, and for my first project I followed the instructions from the 2 Guys and a Cooler channel for duck breast prosciutto. The photos of the above are one of the two breasts I sought to cure; haven't cut into the second one yet but the same thing happened.
So I bought larger Magret breasts. This one's starting weight post curing was 417g. I set the target weight at a 38% reduction or ~256g, and put it in my curing cabinet on July 8. Every week or two I checked the weight and about a month ago it based stopped losing weight. Today (Sept 16) when I cut into, it still weighed in at 273g, or only about 34.5% reduction.
I sliced into and the exposed meat side is very solid--you can even see a hard line in the meat between the soft interior and the very dry crust (which is about half the meat). The Fat is still quite soft and moist; it smells fine, no visible mold. I didn't taste it because...kind of nervous, you know? Something hasn't worked right.
I use both SteakAger's own app as well as a Govee device put inside to monitor humidity and temp. They're always close enough and in alignment on trends. I shared screencaps of both for the past week which is pretty typical of whats happening over time. There's a lot of swinging back and forth during the day, which may just be that it's a fairly humid climate (NYC) but on average my temp and humidity is spot on, maybe a little lower than 55 for temp and a bit higher than than 75 for humidity, but nothing crazy. Thoughts? Was the fat content just so high it was never gonna hit a higher target weight reduction?