How to Cure a Country Ham

The process to make a

country

ham is not very difficult, you need some easy to find ingredients, such as brown sugar with salt, as well as what we call green ham. This is no reference to Dr. Seuss, but this is what the meat industry is referring to, it is a green ham which is the un

cure

d hind leg of a pig. Now professional ham curators will tell you that the highest quality hams, the highest quality

country

hams, come from the freshest green hands. If you are doing this at home, it may not be impossible, as most grocery stores do not carry green hams or fresh un

cure

d hams.

Your best option is to work with a local meat processor who can get you a green ham to start with. you get a ham, it's a pretty big piece of meat, our harvest weights for hogs range from 275 to 300 pounds, which will yield about a 23 to 25 pound ham and when you get it a lot of times it's going to be a rough cut. for example, this flank fat here can be removed and basically get a nice sharp knife, start pulling as you cut, trying to make a smooth cut there and even come back here and square it up. go up a little more, okay, you really shouldn't need to adjust the hem collar at all.

This is this curvature where the skin and fat meet and it's called a ham neck. You shouldn't need to adjust that at all. You may encounter wear and tear. loose pieces of fat or meat or in the ham, you can also trim them. Hock length, on the other hand, is a personal preference. Some people like a longer hock, while if you are just starting out I would suggest a shorter hock. It is approximately two and a half to three inches from the heel, it is where the hock meets the ham. It's a good length hock for the beginner to work with, so I suggest a two and a half to three inch hock when the ham goes bad.

During the healing process, it is usually this joint here that is often referred to as the knee joint and therefore the shorter the hock, the easier it will be to heal more there so that the healing can reach the knee joint and heal it before it goes away. bad, the next ingredient you will need is the ham cure. Now rural hams are a kind of reminder of the way meat was cured before mechanical refrigeration, so the basis of ham care must be salt, you can't. cure it completely with salt, but many people also add other ingredients.

This is a basic cure for the hands we use. It's eight pounds of salt, 2 pounds of brown sugar, there's a little bit of black and red pepper, plus a little bit. paprika there too, now a question I am often asked is: can we make a sugar cure every time you add sugar to your ham cure? That's what they will do, it's considered a sugar cure, don't mix the ingredients you're adding. more sugar than salt or your ham will spoil like I said this is a basic cure for ham, about 10 pounds of cure will do about a hundred pounds of green ham.

Here we have two veterans of the 4-hour country ham project underway. To help us apply the cure to these hams, we have established what we need before applying the cure. We have our document here, which is just a typical waxed butcher paper list. A common mistake that hour-long and amateur ham curers make is getting Butcher Paper which is wax, we want the moisture to escape from this ham and a waxed paper will not allow the moisture to escape. You have to realize that these fresh hams are approximately 70 to 75 percent water and we are going to reduce that percentage of water. up to around 50, so we need a way to get the moisture away from the ham.

Other things you can use at a grocery store. Paper bags work well for this. This method of curing another question we often ask ourselves. Can? use an old fertilizer bag, an old feed bag or something like that, obviously fertilizer is not recommended, it contains some chemicals that are toxic to human health and if you use an old feed bag your hams will probably taste like any food that is there. Let's start curing your ham by working on the hock. Our assistant here will show you a good way to help heal the hock further. It is to begin to gently separate the skin from the meat of the ham. hock, as well as around the bone, placing her fingers there just to gently separate the membrane that surrounds the skin and the meat there so that she can pack more cure in there now, to start, she's going to grab a couple handfuls of cure and she's going to start filling it out here.

This is the most critical part of curing a ham, is making sure there is enough curing in this hock, because if the ham spoils during the curing process, usually the lack of curing reaches the hops. in the knee joint, the next step, once we have enough cure in the hock, usually about four or five tablespoons, which is enough to start the curing process in the hock, we will take the rest of the cure and start to put it on all the exposed lean portions of the ham, including the face of the butt and here also on the neck of the ham, so the girls are going to start applying the cure and this is not a very difficult part.

You're just going to put it there, make sure you pat it and rub it there. Sometimes the cure, if you have a dry cure, you can add a little bit of water to it to make it feel like it's moist. to the touch and that will help the cure to adhere to the hams, also a good tip is that once you start the curing process, if your eyes or nose sting, you may want to wash your hands before doing so. , since there is enough. Salt and pepper this if you scratch your eyes or eat your nose, it will be quite painful.

The next step is that we have applied all the cure to our ham. Now we have to wrap it with less paper. the one we started with, it's probably easier to make your paper diamond shape, put the bottom corner over the stem, you're going to have a short side here and fold it like this, bring the other corner in and then we start bringing the top closer as well and if a little bit of the ham is exposed, no problem, once you've moved the corner closer you can use a small piece of tape to hold the paper in place.

What I'm going to do is turn the hem, take a ham saw, these can be purchased online, they are commonly known as ham socks or ham sake nets and what you want to do is make sure there is a seam at the end of the ham you want to make sure you cross right through the hawk, simply open our ham sock, slide it on tight again, make sure you have the seam right over the end of your hock and these ham socks fit snugly, so they will . Stretch the next step we're going to do once we get it in the sock and this is where if you're working with a charge the younger kids may need help as the ham is pretty heavy right now when I start to Shake the ham inside the sock holding the top well and then pile up the sock and if you start smoothing the skin of the ham up, that helps straighten out the skin that's under the ham once you get to this pig.

Part Once you get to this part, it will be ready to be hung in the barn and start the curing process naturally as the ham begins the curing process, which we describe the curing process as salt curing and the sugar that enters the ham. see it's already starting to expel some of that water, it takes about two days per pound of ham for a ham to cure or a good rule of thumb as a ham this size will take about 60 days to cure and so what? You'll see that once it's hung in the barn and we're hanging it with one hock pointing down, like always, so we have this nice teardrop shape, the hams will start to lose moisture and it's very common to see that. puddles of water under the ham while they are hanging in the ham house, that is very common, don't panic, that is what we want to happen, but basically what is happening now is that the salt and that sugar mixture are penetrating the muscles of the skin of that ham.

Now what you won't see are the peppers we added here, they are too big to fit into the ham, they will stay on the surface and contribute to the overall color of the ham. finished skein our hams have been transporting for about 60+ days in colder temperatures or if you're making an ambulance and spring rolls, it's time for what we call peeling the ham, we're going to remove the ham stock. To remove the old paper put a new sock on the hams and let them go through the summer sweat as you can see the girls have discovered the hams have removed the old paper and if you remember how much curing we apply to the hams at the beginning of the curing process versus the end of the process you can see that the only thing left is a little bit of PAP a custom red pepper a little bit of red pepper red pepper flakes as a cure used in this ham you can see how much of that has penetrated the ham over the last 60 days and the red pepper, black pepper and paprika remain on the surface, another common thing you will see, especially when we have a wet winter or your hams are in a humid environment you will see mold start to grow on them.

It is a harmless mold. It is actually mainly a penicillin type mold. It can be easily cleaned. It's not a big deal, just remember that this type of mold does not produce toxins. They come off easily once you remove the paper from the ham and clean the ham it's time to put on a new sock as you can see we've done it here one more time paying close attention we have the scene right above the face . of the hock there so that the ham is straight, we get that nice teardrop shape, if you do it at home, this is the time when you can smoke the ham, although in Kentucky hams are either smoked or not, but if you smoke a ham Be careful, this is a cold smoke for these hams, so what you're going to do is make sure your smoker doesn't go over a hundred to 105 degrees and that you can smoke it for as long as you want.

The common one is 12 to 105 degrees. 24 hours or although we've heard of single smoking for over 36 hours and basically what we're going to do is hang the ham back up making sure the heat is pointed downwards, this one is a little bit wonky here. We're straightening out we're going to hang the ham back up and it's going to go through the summer sweat this is where it's fully cured right now this is where it's going to start to develop its characteristic country ham flavor and aroma as the enzymes will start to break it down The fats and proteins in this ham will develop those characteristic flavors in a room. here are the aging rooms at the University of Kentucky.

We try to keep the temperature in our aging rooms at approximately seventy to seventy degrees. seventy-five degrees, which will help produce that characteristic country ham flavor and aroma. One of the things we can do in the UK is control the humidity in these rooms. We try to maintain a relative humidity of around sixty percent, which prevents mold growth. mainly so we don't have to clean the mold off the finished ham, we'll age our hands between six and nine months, so what you're seeing here is mostly rumored to be around nine months old. Oh, you.