Cured Meat Podcast: Common Ham Curing Mistakes

edwards virginia smokehouse presents the cured meat podcast today's question is what are some common mistakes when carrying a ham i guess i mean there's a litany of things that can go wrong when you're carrying a ham she that that details that if you don't pay attention to but and you can go into the details of how you raise the pig i mean i'm not gonna go the deep dive on that side so much but clearly starting with the right breed of pork and the right how you raise the pig has a has an impact we've talked about that in the past but starting assuming that you're starting with the right pork to begin with the kill date and cut date and arrival of the fresh pork at the right temperature oftentimes uh the delivery of that fresh pork if you're not paying attention to the temperature and how long it's been between the cut date and the arrival of the fresh pork when you put it in salt impacts the end result and you won't know that until you get to the point of sticking the ham to test it and any kind of temperature abuse or any taking too long to get it to you we like to get it within three days max of the uh cut date um which would be four days from the kill date preferably i mean i can remember way back when we would kill cut and have it the third day which was the best i mean it would just the freshness made a big impact on on the end result so once you got the ham uh applying the salt we like to use a flake salt and al burger flake salt and really rubbing that salt into the ham but another mistake that some people make is they'll go to a warehouse or to their storage shed and get whatever salt they're using and it's been stored in a shed that it's 90 degrees outside and they put hot salt on that chilled ham well that's just jacking the temperature up the surface temperature the ham that's a mistake that's going to cause again it's not going to ruin a whole batch necessarily but it could increase the spoilage rate of that lot of hams that you're using applying the salt correctly which is rubbing the salt in the on the face of the ham and on the butt end of the ham and then packing this the the ham hock end if it's a cut end where you've actually cut it past the knuckle joint on the leg down to where there's exposed pork you need to pack the salt in that hock and then pile that salt on top of it before you lay it in salt and i've seen people get in a hurry they don't rub it enough and they don't pack the hock you know you've heard the term spare the rod spoil the child spare the salts boil the ham kind of same concept so and and then five days later when you when we re-salt we actually um you know knock that old salt off put a fresh coating of salt on and re-stack them again with making sure that each layer has a good dose of salt on it on the first salting just to back up a little bit we actually apply sodium nitrate on the surface of the ham we call it the banjo or the face of the hand so where the h bone is the meaty part on the inside of the hip you just put uh we we apply about three and a half ounces per hundred weight but it's a pinch just a pinch of that sodium nitrate you keep away from the h bone and you hand rub that that sodium nitrate in and you keep it away from the h-bone because if you get too close it'll cause that meat to dry and it'll separate from the h-bone which will cause a crack and that crack will allow air to get down in it which will also cause it to spoil again just little details if you're not paying attention to it if you get into a hurry that'll cause a problem so then the hams have been re-salted and then the other mistake that i think people make is you know when in doubt doubt leave it in salt longer which to me makes the hands too salty um i think grating your hands by weight and you know hands that way um you know we 17 17 to 20s 20 23's 23 26's three pound weight ranges and then you figure out how many days you want to leave them in salt and we have our levels of salt that we like which we we try to target four and a half percent when it's done um in a certain water activity which normally we target a minimum of 18 percent shrink in the weight of the ham but if you leave the ham in salt too long you can get an 18 shrink but it's going to be brownie salt if you leave it in there too long and i think if you use the wrong kind of salt i think there's some salts i can't explain why if you use some kind of salt they just taste it ends up tasting too salty and you know i've seen i've seen some guys who go gee it's friday and it's two o'clock and we got one more batch of hands we got to wash but i want to go it's time to go bass fishing it's time to go and they'll say we'll do it on monday in just that extra three days you come back and you wash those hands or they'll forget they they miss a batch and when you first thing you know they're a week later and they don't get washed on time and you go to slice them up and or cook them and you wonder why they taste salty it's just paying attention to that time in detail also each step of the process there is in our case we like the salting rooms to be 38 to 40 degrees we'd like equalization to be 50 degrees 80 humidity we like the aging rooms to be a certain temperature 83 to 85 degrees with a 65 to 68 humidity we really pay attention to that we don't like to deviate from that because if we do we know we're going to end up with a different product so maintaining your your your weight ranges of your product maintaining the same salt maintaining the temperature ranges consistently you end up with the same and the same pork that you start with and paying attention to those details every day you're going to end up with the same product all the time yeah and as sam said i mean it really is the devil is in the details from start to finish from the the farm to the slaughterhouse to us to all the way through and you know with uh our country ham line it's it's i don't want to say it's easier but it's certainly a little bit more controllable since we're dealing with a more consistent size pig coming in uh yeah we we kind of know what to look for on those where it gets a little more challenging is on the suryano where you know none of the small farmers we work with on those are really scaling on property they're eyeballing the hogs going ah she looks about 280 you know and that's the size all we want you get hogs going to slaughter ranging from 250 to 320. so we really have to dial in on the suryan as the sam mentioned grading those hams out making sure we're looking at that weight controlling the salt controlling the process all the way through you know it's not just a daily check it's multiple checks every day with a clipboard checking temps humidities every single room all the way throughout the the entire process and that's where i think from the home chef our you know chefs trying to do their own or the home the person trying to do that at home is is the inability to maintain those consistent temps and humidity throughout the entire process you know if they're trying to keep it in their garage fridge or i've actually mentioned this before in walk-ins you know they might try and keep that product all the way back of their the walk-in in their restaurant but every time that door opens you're changing the temp you're changing the humidity so they're not going to be able to get that consistent product all the way through if people really want to try and work with it at home absolutely we applaud that we applaud the initiative we applaud the effort it's a great little hobby to get into but just make sure you're doing it right and actually uh virginia tech probably has one of the best online resources for the home cure if they want to see how to cure a ham yeah virginia tech how to cure him and it's a step-by-step process that's pretty detailed um not quite as dare i say retentive as we are but it will give the home chef the home cure the home hobbyist some great information on what to look for and avoid some of those mistakes that we see you know not just uh in in the small world of home chefs and restaurants but you know these these are some errors uh sam's you know it could just be laziness or wanting to go bass fishing you know i mean something that simple can actually destroy an entire lot of hams not necessarily by storage but a totally different pla flavor profile of what we're looking for what they're looking for so devil is in the details you know one thing i forgot to mention the smoking process which is really important uh it it normally takes us about a week well on the farm it may take two or three weeks because you're not smoking 24 hours a day seven days a week or if you're doing it in a you know homemade smokehouse behind the house so you're using probably using hickory wood or oak and a mistake that i can recall my dad and my grandfather talking about is they would put green hickory logs and then try to get the thick heavy smoke and if you weren't careful you get it too hot so they would always remind me about you know when we started this i mean i as a kid we used to have smoke houses where we had a 55-gallon drum that we cut half of the ends out of both ends and we threw the green logs in and threw some hick some kerosene on it and you'd light it off and of course you know my thought was i want to get that thing really rolling and they nope you want to keep it low and cool as possible you didn't want to get too hot because the hams were hanging way up in the top of the smokehouse they weren't hanging low but you wanted it to be like a cool smoke and of course now with temperature controlled smoke houses we can maintain 85 and a really thick smoke so if you're doing it at home be careful not to get your fire too hot and if you have access to green sawdust that you can throw on the logs to kind of chill it down it makes a lot of smoke too so that's just a tip that would help generate the smoke and keep it cool yeah and for the home care sam i'm not sure if you remember we used to have that group that would uh get some fresh wigwams from us and do their they were actually using an old shipping container it was a retired pastor and a group of his buds out in oh they were just outside of lynchburg and uh they were actually using an old shipping container as their smokehouse but they would smoke them they would get those from us just the fresh hams from us in late january early february uh and go ahead the 30 days on salt they would hang them but they were doing all ambient with screening but just holes cut in their shipping container and i actually asked him i said you know how does that go from from smoking i know you can kind of keep the temperature because you're doing it when it's still cold outside but how about the aging process in a steel shipping container in the summer heat he goes yeah it gets a little warm in there you know so again but the hams were great he actually brought us some to try one year and there it was pretty uh they did a great job with it and so it was again even even in no matter what you're working with as long as they're paying attention to the details opening up a little bit more airflow on a it was a 27-foot shipping container that they were using he said yeah we one day they forgotten the temp inside got up to like 120 degrees before they like we they just open it up and let it air out for a little while to bring the tent back down but even that was a good advantage of hams for him so as long as you pay attention anything's possible got a cured meat question let us know in the comments below thanks for watching

Channel: Edwards Virginia Smokehouse

Views: 4,497

Rating: 4.8688526 out of 5

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Id: FZwpGA-UvfE

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020