Call Me Captain Ham!

Can you smell it?

So its been four weeks.  A long four weeks... Four weeks since that 18 lb ham went into the brine.   I used Pop's Brine recipe from The Smoking Meat Forums.  I'd done some bacon in the same exact recipe and been pretty thrilled with the results.

The process consisted of mixing up the brine which was 1 cup of non-iodized table salt, 1 cup of brown sugar, 1 cup of regular sugar, and 1 ounce of Cure #1 pink salt (by pink salt, I DO NOT mean Himalayan salt - this is curing salts which is something totally different - google it if you are unsure what I mean) per gallon of cold water.

Then I did my best to inject brine along the bone lines.  The idea being that you want the ham to cure from the inside out as well as from the outside in.  Pop's recipe states that you should inject anything that is thicker than 2 inches or so.  This ham certainly fit that bill.  Along that line of thought, I injected quite a bit all over the place - since I was told that you can't really over cure by injecting too much.

I submerged the ham in about a gallon and a half of the brine and then weighted it down (to keep it underneath the liquid) with a big old liter beer mug (known as a Maß) that made its way home with me from an evening at the Oktoberfest in Munich many moons ago.  Some people will fill a big ziplock with water and close it to use as a weight - but after reading about one person whose bag opened and diluted the brine, I erred on the side of caution, even if it was somewhat undignified duty for the the trusty old glass mug.

A couple times through the brine process, I turned the ham in the brine to make sure that all surface area of the meat had ample time to be in contact with the cure.  Dunno if it was necessary, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

Pardon the lousy novice butcher trimming job!

I had noticed that the salt in the bacon I'd similarly brined was a bit high for my tastes.  So... I thought I'd soak the ham a bit to see if I could take out a bit of the salt.  Why I didn't slice off a piece and fry it up BEFORE soaking in fresh water is quite beyond me.  That's the third time in a row I failed to do a test piece... talk about forgetting the basics!  DUH!

So, I soaked in cold fresh water for about 24 hours with one water change in the middle.

Then, I removed the ham, patted as much of the liquid off as I could and put it uncovered in the fridge for about 36 hours to dry off and develop that tacky pellicle that is supposed to be helpful in getting the smoke to stick to the meat.

One by one pellet loading keeps your helper busy for HOURS!

Then I had my faithful assistant load up the Amazen Pellet smoker with a mixture of hickory, cherry, and maple pellets.  Its pretty dangerous work, hence the hard hat.

After that, I cold smoked in the Big Green Egg for about 10 hours.  It was about 60 degrees outside and the internal temperature in the Egg never got above 70 so that certainly qualifies as cold smoking.

My original plan was to cold smoke it a while and then remove it and build a hot smoking fire in the Egg.

You can see a little bit of the brown color from the smoke

However, it looked like the weather was going to get crappy and I didn't feel like building a fire in the rain.  I figured that the ham already had some nice smoke on it so I'd just finish it in the oven.

One thing I did notice (and the same thing had happened to one of the slabs of bacon I'd cold smoked) was once the temp inside the Egg hit a certain point, the meat started to sweat.  I am sure this has to do with ambient temperature, meat temperature, relative humidity, air circulation, and the airspeed velocity of unladen European swallows, but frankly I don't really care that much.  I dobbed up the sweat with a paper towel and kept smoking.

Smells great!

 Once rain was imminent, I declared the cold smoking process "complete" (convenient, eh?) and brought the ham inside to the fridge and let it sit overnight.
**NOTE**  If you place a piece of meat that has been smoked into your fridge for any period of time, your fridge will take on that lovely aroma for a long while.

The next day I cranked up the oven to 250 and cooked the ham until the internal temp was 155 degrees.  This took quite a while (5 or 6 hours?).  After a few hours, I pulled it out, scored the fat cap, and applied a maple-brown sugar glaze.

Pork candy!

In hindsight, next time I may try to trim a little more of the fat off and try harder to keep a uniform fat cap.  The fat tastes SO good that I want to make sure that there is some on every slice if I can help it.  But I don't want so much of it on each slice that people have the urge to trim it off... because they'll trim more than they need to I think.

As I started to carve it up (talk about a hack job...), I noticed one small part (about the diameter of a quarter and about 2-3 inches long) that was gray.  I've seen pictures of meat that have failed to cure all the way through and it looked just like that.

That little gray section is the culprit!

You can see what I am talking about to the left.  Basically, its where the brine failed to penetrate.

I smelled it and it smelled like cooked pork.  That said, I generously trimmed around it and tossed that section in the trash.  Given that this was a long cure (28 days), I was worried that if there was any section that wasn't cured completely that it might have soured but I didn't get that impression at all.

I'm pretty confident that it would have been safe to eat given that this was a large whole muscle cure and at no point did that section ever come into contact with air.  And the fact that it was submerged in brine the entire time (aside from the smoking and cooking period), I can't imagine that the risk is high at all.  That said, I didn't want to take any chances so I pitched it.  Had this been a commercial operation, my guess is that they would have had to discard the entire ham... fortunately I'm not subjected to that kind of scrutiny.  I will say that next time, I'll be even more diligent to ensure full brine penetration via injection.

Someone is hovering for scraps.

So, after carving off enough for dinner (which was delicious by the way), I was faced with putting it into the form of slices for sandwiches.

Admittedly, having a meat slicer here helped quite a bit.  I can see where having an even nicer meat slicer would be even better though as ours just isn't "cutting" it sometimes (HA!).  It always manages to pull some of the bottom part of the meat downward and not slicing it evenly.  This results in a lot of trim - which is okay in some instances because you can use those trimmings in other dishes.

Where's that loaf of rye bread?

I diced up all the trimmings as best I could and we'll use those for omelettes, ham/potato hash, or maybe even ham salad.

I gotta admit that I'm looking forward to having some sandwiches with this stuff.  What a great flavor and that fat tastes unlike anything I've ever had before.  You really can just eat it by itself.  Now I'm going to do more exploration of preparations that are done just with fat (lardo?) so I can leverage even more of that for the next hog we butcher.  While we've really enjoyed all the lard we rendered out, skillet frying up a nice slab of cured fat sounds like something I really want to be a part of!

Holy Ham Batman!

I wish I weighed everything up after I vacuum sealed it.  I've eaten ham a couple of days for left overs from some of the larger chunks that I trimmed up.

So yeah, in hindsight, the only things I think I'll do different next time are;

 - try to trim the fat more uniformly and a bit thinner

- be sure to inject like a banshee!

- fry up a test piece BEFORE I soak it

Aside from that, I got this ham thing down.  Now, what do I do with this?

Split pea soup anyone?

The Last of the Bacon... For Now.

So the other two slabs of pork belly came out of the cure this past weekend.  These were brined using Pop's Brine from The Smoking Meat Forums website.  It's well regarded and from what he says, being a less salty cure, you can go past your target date a bit without going into "Too Salty" territory.

Happiness is a crisp morning with a smokin' Egg.

 Essentially, the recipe is pretty darn easy.  1 Gallon of cold water (obviously, the better the water you've got, the better off you are - I used tap water with the chlorine and fluoride filtered out), 1 cup non-iodized table salt, 1 cup regular sugar, 1 cup brown sugar, and 1 ounce curing salt (Cure 1, pink salt, prague powder 1 - there many different labels this stuff has - but we're NOT talking about Morton's Tenderquick or Cure #2 here).

26 hours of Apple smoke can put some color on your bacon!

Mix it all together (no reason to heat the water - it'll all dissolve just fine with some heavy stirring.  Pop says that for full bellies, you should go for between 10-14 days in the brine.  Since my bellies were a little on the thick side - just a hair over 2 inches at the thickest part - I went the full 14 days.

I pulled them from the brine and let them dry on a rack in the fridge for a day or so to get that tacky pellicle to form.  Then I smoked them over Apple wood for about 26 hours straight (I let it go all night) and then back in the fridge to get cold before slicing.

Pretty...

My meat slicer (the Edgecraft 610) gets a workout on this process.  I can say now that I understand why some say to just save your money and buy a used Hobart slicer off craigslist.  This slicer tends to pull the meat downward which seems to leave a chunk along the bottom that I find myself having to trim off.

But, the good news is that there is plenty of trim bagged up to use to flavor soups, stews, greens, and who knows what else.

I gotta admit, it sure is a neat thing to see piles of sliced bacon all over the counter waiting to get the vacuum pack treatment from the Food Saver.

Not from this batch.  But still pretty!

Okay - full confession mode here.  I can't believe this but I actually forgot to save a couple slices to fry up.  My wife and I were not feeling 100% due to a head cold that has been making its rounds and we were anxious to get the job done.

So, the picture you see to the left is the previous week's bacon... the stuff I said was a little on the salty side.  As soon as I've finished off cooking what is left of that bag, I'll thaw out a package of this week's bacon to see how different it is.

In the future, I'll need to remember to slice off a chunk when it comes out of the cure BEFORE hitting the smoker.  That way, if its too salty, I can soak it in cold water before smoking it to help draw out some of the salt.  I failed to do that on BOTH of these batches.  I'm such a rookie!

Second Day - Curing/Rendering/Sausage

After a much needed night's sleep, it was time to get down to the business of processing.  I gotta tell you, I was beat.  Once the cutting and such had been completed the night before, there was a great deal of clean up.  My wife had embraced the idea of the me butchering a hog on her counter.  It would have been unproductive to leave bone dust and fat scraps all over the counter and the floor.

But there were lots of bowls containing lots of pork parts in lots of places in several fridges.  I needed to get them "working".  After all, you can't EAT bacon until the bacon is done being made... and nobody else was going to make this bacon, but me!

*I actually didn't do all this on one day - some lard was done on one day and the rest the next.  Sausage was made on one day and then smoked the next - so technically, this entry encompasses two days for those of you who are paying too close attention.*


I started with the leaf fat.  I wasn't going to use any of that for sausage. Apparently it is too hard for sausage and doesn't work well being instead prized for biscuits and pie crusts.  So I diced it up into smallish chunks and tossed it into the crock pot.

Leaf fat in the slow cooker

Covering and setting the cooker on low will, over the coarse of the whole day, turn the fat into lard.  It helps to put 1/4 cup of water into the bottom so that as the initial fat starts to melt it doesn't start to scorch or burn first.  Once everything is starting the cook down and become liquid, cant the lid open a bit to let the moisture evaporate.

Floaty (is that a word?) bits

Here it is after several hours.  For what its worth, I removed the skin before I rendered this out.  What is floating around in there are essentially the "husks" of the above cubed fatty chunks.

Think of them like bacon.  You have the meaty part and the fatty part.  When you fry it up, the fatty part doesn't really disappear leaving you with a couple slivers of meaty parts.  It still holds some sort of structure.  These little bits are essentially the outside structure.

Strained floaty bits

Here are some of said floaty bits on a paper towel.  I'm not quite sure what to do with them.  Are they cracklin'?  I thought they were.  Some say that cracklin' is instead the skin that is left on when rendering lard.  I thought those were pork rinds.

Who the heck knows... I've got to do some research on this.

Hot rendered lard in canning jars.

 After the fat has rendered down, I killed the heat to the crockpot and strained it through a cheese cloth lined strainer and then put it into jars.

Make sure you don't skip the straining step.  Any little chunks and floaty bits that you leave in the liquid fat with cause it to go rancid that much sooner.

Let it cool on the counter and then put it into the freezer or fridge until ready to use.

Both types after cooling (left is back fat lard, right is leaf lard)

I repeated the process with the back fat.  I wound up with 4 pints of leaf lard and 2 pints of back fat lard.

To the right is a side by side comparison.  The whiter jar on the right is the leaf lard.  It should have much less pork flavor than the back fat lard on the right - which is why it is preferred for baking.

We used some leaf lard in some corn bread the other night and I have to say, it was excellent.

Getting some help mixing spices

Now it was time for the sausage.  I planned to do about 10 lbs of cold smoked kielbasa.  I had 5 lbs of grass fed beef round roast and about 4 lbs of pork trimmings and a pound of back fat.  After mixing up the spices.  The meat was ground, mixed, and stuffed into hog casings.

They dried in the fridge over night to develop a pellicle - which is the tacky sticky "film" that develops when meat starts to dry out.  This is what gets the smoke to adhere.  If you casings are still wet when you try to smoke them, you'll get bad results.

Getting smoke... 

I planned to cold smoke the kielbasa.  I understood this to be a way to get much more mellow and deep smoke flavor.  Since there was a curing salt in the sausage I wasn't worried about letting them sit in warm (55 degrees) Big Green Egg for 10 hours or so.

The Big Green Egg is a little tricky to convince to smoke without generating heat.  After all, I wanted to smoke the sausage, not cook it (I'd cook it later once I'd applied lots of smoke to it).  So, I used something called an A-Maze-N-Pellet Smoker.

A-Maze-N Pellet smoker in the bottom of the Big Green Egg

 Its a pretty slick little thing.  You fill it with your choice of wood pellets and light it.  Provided it has enough airflow, it creates a nice stream of steady smoke for more 12 hours (which was more than I needed).  AND, it generates about as much heat as a lit cigarette.

I hope to tinker with using it to smoke salmon and cheese at some point.  But for right now, I'm still in pork mode.

After 10 hours of cold smoke, the sausage went into the fridge to rest.  I see people say that this lets the sausage equalize the flavors and such.  For me, it was more that it was late and I was ready to hit the sack.

The next day it rained and so I just cooked the sausage in the oven to an internal temp of 150 degrees.  Cut it into sections and vacuum sealed it up.




Sadly, I have no pictures of brining the bacon or the ham.  The brine recipe comes from a well regarded source on The Smoking Meat Forum website.  It's called Pop's Brine and seems to yield good results and has a loyal following.

I injected the ham with a good bit of the brine and put it in a 5 gallon food safe bucket and covered it in two gallons of the brine, weighting it down with a big zip-lock filled with water to keep it under the brine.

For the three bacon sections, I put two of them in another bucket with the same brine (1 gallon) and weighted them down the same way.  The other section was rubbed down in a curing mix taken from Ruhlman's book "Charcuterie" that I mentioned in another post.  It is regarded as being overly salty but I had some guidance from a Facebook post (Thanks Mark!) to just use 4% of it based on weight.  So if the meat weighed 2000 grams (2 kilograms) then 4% of that would be 80 grams of basic cure mix to rub the meat down with.  Put it in a tightly sealed zip lock back and stick in the fridge.  It will draw moisture out and almost make a brine so be sure to flip it daily so that all sides get plenty of time in contact with the brine.  After 7 days, you pull it out, rinse it off and let it dry in the fridge (that pellicle thing again!) before you smoke it.

The cure-rubbed bacon after a week.

I realize I am fast forwarding a week here with this picture but here is the piece of bacon after it was rinsed and dried off.

It's sitting the fridge as I type this and will go into the cold smoker tomorrow morning for most of the day.  Hopefully it comes out well.  But if not, there's two more curing in a brine that will be ready in about another week.