Ham
What's better than a ham sandwich? Jen and Holly talking about one...
Listen in to find out how Jen and Holly turned the hams from the pigs they raised and harvested themselves into a variety of delicious meals. Who knew making your own smoked ham and prosciutto was so simple.
HAM - Episode 4 (Season 1) A Freezer Full Of Meat Podcast
If you’re not in a position to listen, here’s our episode highlights and written commentary:
We slaughtered our pigs at the beginning of December, so Holly was able to pickle her ham in a wet brine for a couple of weeks, just in time for Christmas. Holly made Julskinka, a boiled ham dish from Sweden, where everyone dips-in the same dish.
Brining - submerging food in salt water - buys you time and staves off spoilage if cold or freezing conditions are not available.
What is a ham? A ham is a large hunk of meat from the rump and back leg of a pig, made-up of more than one muscle, around the femur bone (with ball joint).
The hams make up a very large part of the pig.
The femur bone can be removed to prepare a deboned ham.
Hams can be smoked or not. Bone-in smoked ham will give a smoky bone for a smoky broth.
Hot-smoking is when meat is cooked by exposing it to hot-smoke. Hot smoking is done at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
HOW TO HOT-SMOKE A HAM
Brine the ham for 10-14 days, depending on size.
Remove from brine, pat dry, and leave in fridge overnight.
Hot-smoke at 200 with non-resinous, sweet wood (apple, pear, maple, hickory, cherry…).
You can buy wood chips for smoking. Soaking the chips/green branches is advisable.
American style honey-glazed ham is prepared as described above. After two hours in the smoker, baste with a mixture of honey and mustard, perhaps garlic too, until all the glaze is gone. Slash the skin crosswise before glazing.
There is blue smoke (better) and white smoke (less good).
Smoking a ham takes time, but most of it is inactive time. Smoking food affords the opportunity to hang-out with friends and/or to go outside and observe your surroundings. Smoking affords a pause from the flow of things (“I need to check on the smoker…”).
When you have lots of tasks to do at home, it is a good time to smoke some meat. Needs to be checked periodically over a long period of time.
Smoking a ham changes its colour; it takes on a reddish/pink hue.
We did not use nitrates or celery juice, which are said to prevent spoilage and give a pinkish colour to the meat. Traditional, artisanal preparations did not use them. Saltpeter, a component of gun powder, was sometimes used to keep the meat pink in colour. Since smoking meat changes the colour to pink, perhaps smoking contributes nitrogen compounds to the meat? Smoking is, after all, a traditional form of food preservation.
Hot-smoking is not the only way to prepare hams. They can also be salted and hung. In ideal conditions, they can be so preserved for years.
Salted meats are traditional for those near salt sources: salt-sprays from sea, salt springs…
Dry-cured hams
prosciutto: a whole ham, with aitch bone removed, covered all over with salt and drained, and salted, and weighted down for 30 days, then rinsed with wine, vinegar (or salt brushed off). Exposed meat is covered with lard and hung to dry for at least 6 months. Start thinly cutting away until it is very hard. Those bits can be cut up and cooked into other dishes. Don’t forget to save the ham bone for soup.
Southern-style ham: treated with a spice rub consisting of salt, something sweet (maple-syrup or molasses), as well as other herbs and spices, cured for 2-3 weeks, then cold smoked at 75 - 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 18-24 hours, then hung to dry. The smoke is cool and does not cook the meat.
A black forest ham is prepared similarly to the Southern-style ham outlined above.
These preparations require a suitable place for aging them, ideally with air temperatures around 10-16 degrees Celsius, and 60-70% humidity.
Is salt really terrible for us? Some metabolic processes require sodium, so moderate amounts are essential for health, and of course for improving taste.
Salt in excess, mostly found in highly processed foods, is added to make up for lack of real flavour.
Free access to salt galvanized Indian independence from the British, as Ghandi mobilized people, in defiance of the British-imposed salt tax, to make their own salt from the sea.
For traditional peoples, salt made life easier as it helped to preserve meat and stave off spoilage, while also enhancing flavour. In the Little House on the Prairie series, salted pork is a mainstay. It is a portable, stable food in uncertain times. They always had salt pork in the back of the wagon.
Salt transforms pork and makes it fit to eat. Traditional preparations of pork are salted. If not salted, then prepared with vinegar.
Traditional cultures understood how to prepare pork to make it suitable as food. We need to listen to those customs. The Weston A. Price Foundation researched the relationship to properly prepared pork and how it affects our blood.
People have the perception that pigs are risky animals to raise, as they have communicable diseases to humans. Perhaps this why prohibitions related to eating pork exist in some cultures. Is the prohibition against eating pork in Jewish and Muslim traditions because of the warm climate that these traditions originated from, as the meat might be too easily spoiled?
Choose animals to raise that make sense in your environment.
Pigs are omnivorous. They are easy to feed and can be given all of your scraps.
Food being thrown away by grocery stores can be recuperated to feed hogs.
Pigs are so easy to feed that they were amongst the first animals brought by colonizers (Columbus, De Soto) to new lands.
Because they are so easy to feed, they are a very accessible animal for many people looking for self-sufficiency and going out onto the range.
Pig can be a real snapshot of “terroir”. How you finish the pig will affect greatly how it tastes.
It makes sense to fatten pigs for slaughter in the autumn when there is a abundant source of food to give to the them: apples, acorns, figs, chestnuts, pumpkin…
Pigs seem to like forest environments with humus-rich soil and fungi. They will clean all the fallen fruit under trees and turn the soil. Because they are so good at turning soil, they can be used to prepare land for planting.
It matters what you give your animals to eat. What they eat and how they live is passed on to you.
Descendants of the wild boar, the modern industrial pig is quite transformed from its ancestor.
Pigs were obviously very close to humans for some time, as is evidenced in many ham and pig-related expressions in the English language: ham-fisted, ham-fattened, you’re such a ham, hambone, high on the hog…
We have stopped trusting traditional wisdom, even though, not so long ago, people still did, including the boom generation who would have witnessed these customs.
When you are unsure, be like Alice (from Alice in Wonderland) when she samples the mushroom: try a little bit.
There are likely condiments that mitigate the potential carcinogenic effects of smoked meat, like wasabi is paired with sushi.
Seek out people in your community that still have traditional wisdom and ask if they’ll share with you.
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