Charcuterie Update - Making Hams at Home

I’ve been doing a fair amount of charcuterie at home of late. Although I always do some, it seems that recently, I’ve always had a project going. I’ve been making bacon and pancetta on a regular basis for more than a year and had dabbled with some brine cured hams and things like tasso, but hadn’t really done much curing of other cuts of pork.

Recently, my wife bought a few boneless pork sirloin roasts at a good price. They were about a pound and a half each. My wife isn’t that familiar with various cuts of meat and is apprehensive of buying cuts that she doesn’t specifically know about lest I disapprove and give her a meat lecture using one of the dogs to model where different cuts are from, which normally gets me in a bit of trouble, (though the dog doesn’t seem to mind his part). But the price on these was so good, she decided to give it a shot (after all, they’d make fine dog food if I didn’t want to use them). Sirloin is normally roasted or cut into chops. I did a bunch of research and couldn’t find anyone who had recipes for curing sirloin. The two pieces were about two inches thick and I thought that they’d be fine for curing in a similar manner to pork belly, so I decided to give it a shot.

I coated the outside of one of them with molasses and then added the basic salt/pink salt/sugar cure I normally use. Then I put it in a zip lock bag in the fridge. One thing I have learned in salting and curing is that it’s easy to overestimate how much salt you need. The first few times, I completely coated the cuts which lead to incredibly over salted finished products. It’s hard to describe how much to put on. It’s something you really need to learn by doing it, but eventually I realized that time is more important than the quantity of salt. I light coating will penetrate the meat given enough time. Cuts 2-3 inches thick normally cure in about a week for me. So, you can start it one weekend and finish it the next.

I took my “ham” out of the ziplock after a week, and then washed it well to remove the surface salt. The color had changed and the meat had firmed up. I left it on a cake rack to dry for about 90 minutes before I put it on the smoker. I have a small smoker. It’s nothing fancy. It’s essentially a small metal box with an electric burner in the bottom. You put a small metal pan filled with wood chips on the burner and eventually you get smoke. Because it’s outside, the temperature in the smoker is largely dependant on the ambient temperature outside. In the winter, it gets to about 80-90 degrees inside. On a hot summer day it gets up to about 125 or so. It was a decent spring day (one of the few we’ve had so far) and I put it in the smoker and added some apple wood chips.

Smoking is an art, and it’s not one that I think I’ve mastered by any means. I have found that I prefer fruit wood for most of the things I smoke. I also like hickory for more traditional barbecue type of things. Apple has become the de facto wood for so many small bacon producers (just check out the bacon at any high end retailer and it’s likely apple smoked), but I’ve also used cherry with nice results. This being the northwest, I also have some alder, but it’s something that’s traditionally used more for fish than anything else.

Smoking does a couple of things. Most of us just think about the actual smoke flavor that it gets, but from a curing and preserving stand point, there’s another more important process that happens during smoking. Smoking helps to reduce the water content, which is essential for long term preservation of meat. As meat smokes, it loses water weight and the texture of the meat firms up. That’s why hams are firmer than fresh cuts. For the small scale curing that I do, where I rarely cure anything more than about 4 or 5 pounds, I can smoke things in a single day. I generally give things between 6-12 hours on the smoker. I’d like to say it’s dependant on the cut, size, etc, but just as often it’s determined by how early I get the meat in the smoker.

In my early attempts at smoking, I always over smoked everything by using too much wood. You don’t need a constant stream of smoke. If the chips in the pan burn away, it’s fine. I will refill it partially every few hours, but even if the pan is empty, the drying process continues. The gentle heat from the burner creates an updraft in the burner, which helps to carry away moisture form the meat. If you over smoke the meat, you can end up with a bitter coating on the outside of the meat. Again, time is more important than the amount of chips. Both curing and smoking aren’t things you can rush. Using extra salt and or more chips won’t compensate for the lack of time.

I left this first “ham” on the smoker for about 8 hours and then finished it on the Weber grill where I let it get to an internal temperature of about 155. It was completely firm and when I cut into it, it was a beautiful red color all the way through. The outside had a mahogany patina to it. It tasted wonderful. It was a little saltier than I wanted but not overdone. The smoke flavor was prominent but the outside pieces didn’t taste bitter or resiny. It was certainly better than anything you could buy at the normal supermarkets. You could order a real country ham that was better, but for $1.48 a pound I was pretty well pleased. (And the leftovers made great omelets.)

I have another one curing now and will smoke it this weekend. Last weekend, I finished some maple cured bacon. I used maple syrup as a base and then salted the meat. It was left on the smoker for about 10 hours and came out perfectly. It’s probably the best bacon I’ve made. Unfortunately, the finished weight was only about a pound and a half. It’s interesting using different sweeteners in the process. Even after a week of curing and 10 hours of smoking, you could still smell the maple syrup on the bacon and it still had a slight maple flavor as well. The molasses cure is a little heavier, but works well with ham. I think it might be a bit much for bacon tough.

The most recent Saveur magazine had an article of curing salmon, which I’ve never done but may in the next few weeks.