Home-cured Ham

Home-cured HamSo the end of August brings a lot of things to my family. Our little garden is in full harvest mode, tomatoes have the vines hanging down with weight, we canned quarts and quarts of pickles and picked I don't know how many pounds of green beans. But this year I was able to take advantage of another bounty, local farm-raised pork. A good friend of mine had raised 2 hogs and offered one to me.

Now I have the butchering skills to break down the carcass, but unfortunately I don't have all the tools. My little summer kitchen is lacking a bandsaw for the chops, but my grinder, slicer, stuffer and smoker will do a nice job with everything else.

I asked the kill house to simply portion the hog into roasts, chops and ribs. Everything else I would take fresh, which included 2 hams (halved into 4), 2 pork bellies and about 20 pounds of trimmings which I would grind into sausage.

This is the recipe I found online, courtesy of some BBQ buddies I've competed against and also die-hard Big Green Egg fans! I made a couple changes from their recipe due to things I had on hand and I'm very, very happy with the results!

Home-cured Ham

Ingredients:
3 tablespoons Pickling Spice
3 cups Tender Quick
3 cups Brown Sugar
3 tablespoons CockeyeBBQ Rub
4 cloves Garlic (center)
2 fresh pork hams (halved)

Bring 2 gallons of cold, filtered water to a boil along with above ingredients until Tender Quick and sugar is dissolved and flavor from other ingredients infuses the liquid, about 10-12 minutes.

Remove from the stove and cool until liquid is 38°F, which is ideal temp for brining and curing.

Inject the ham at that cup:4-5 lb meat ratio, making sure that you inject the curing brine to and around the big bone running through the leg. This is a very important step in creating a successful end product.

Now cover the leg roasts with the remaining cold brine. I used a plastic bus bin which held the 4 hams nicely and I used a stainless baking tray to weight down the hams so they didn't float in the bring.

The leg will sit in the curing brine for 8-10 days depending on its size and your personal schedule. Ensure that it is refrigerated in conditions that keep the temperature of the brine as close to that ideal 38°F temp as possible!

After the 8-10 day curing period, congratulations are in order; you've just turned a pork leg into a full-fledged cured ham!! The meat will have that distinct smell of and pink flesh tone of the ham you are used to.

The next step is to draw some of the salt off/out of the ham. How much depends on your particular tastes. What Bryan and I did was give the roast a quick rinse to get the surface salt off and to also remove some of the residual seeds and peppercorns stuck to the ham from the pickling spice, and then we soaked it for 2 hours in cold water. A change of water and then 2 more hours in a second coldwater bath and we were ready to get smokin'!

For smoking the ham, I used my FEC-100 and stuffed the hams into a ham net. Now this isn't at all necessary. You can simply lay the hams on the racks, but I wanted my hams to have the appearance of a professional store bought ham and those little cross-hatched marks on the fat that the netting will make. I tied the open ends of the netting and hung them in the smoker with stainless hog rings.

When the smoker stabilized around 200°F, and the hopper filled up with hickory, I added the hams to the cooking chamber. I would love to try other woods as well. Apple sounds like a good choice, but I just happened to have a full bag of hickory on hand.

I smoked the hams at 200 until the internal temperature read about 130, then I turned the smoker up to 250 and brought the hams to 140-150.

I chose not to glaze the hams, partly because the nets would get all sticky and I figured most of the glaze would be ripped off when I removed the net, but also because I wanted to glaze the hams when I reheated them for dinner.

Here is the glaze recipe (I haven't tested this one yet, but based on the excellence of the brine I wouldn't hesitate to mix this one up).

Based on a slight modification of the recipe provided to us by Reg Pelletier, I would suggest this Dizzyfied starter glaze:

- 1/4 cup mustard
- 1/4 cup honey
- 1/8 cup orange juice
- 1 tablespoon Dizzy Pig Cow Lick rub (I would also suggest trying Dizzy Pig's Raging River, Tsunami Spin, Swamp Venom or Jamaican Firewalk, depending on your preferences.)

Heat on stove, stir/whisk to incorporate ingredients. Apply every 20 minutes or so, until you reach your target temperature.

After a total of about 8 hours on the smoker, the hams came off and were quick cooled in the fridge so they could be vacuum sealed and frozen. I removed the netting first, trimmed any ugly fat or anything that looked funky and sealed and froze them.

My local hog cost me about $1.50/lb and with a little time and effort and now I have 4 hams for my family ready to go for holiday meals, sandwiches, soups and countless other meals.

A 9 lb ham at Sam's Club (I'm sure not as good as these) cost around $3.50-4/lb.

I'm really very very pleased with the results and wanted to share the recipe and story.