How to Cure a Country Ham

the process to making a country ham is not very difficult you need a few easy to find ingredients such as salt brown sugar as well as what we refer to as a green ham this is no no reference to dr. Seuss but this is what the the meats industry refers to is a green ham which is the uncured hind leg of a pig now the professional ham cures will tell you that the highest-quality hams the highest-quality country hams come from the freshest green hands if you're doing this at home this may not be impossible as most grocery stores do not stock green hams or fresh uncured hams your best bet is to work with a local meat processor who can get you a green ham to begin with chances are when you get a ham it's a fairly sizable piece of meat our harvest weights for pigs are running between 275 to 300 pounds which is going to throw roughly a 23 to 25 pound ham and when you get it a lot of times it's going to be rough cut for example this flank fat right here can be taken off and basically get you a nice sharp knife begin to kind of pull as you're as you're cutting trying to make a smooth cut there and even come back here and kind of square it up a little bit more all right you really shouldn't need to adjust the hem collar at all this is this curvature where the skin and the fat meet is called the ham collar shouldn't need to adjust that at all you may come across wear loose pieces of fat or meat or on the ham you can trim those off as well the length of the hock on the other hand is a personal preference some individuals like a longer hock whereas if you're just beginning I would suggest a shorter hock this is roughly around two and a half to three inches off the heel is where the hock meets the ham that's a good length of a hock for the beginner to work with the reason I suggest a two and a half to three inch hock when a ham spoils during the curing process it's generally this joint right here which is often referred to as the stifle joint and so the shorter the hock the easier it is to get more cure in there so the cure can get to the stifle joint and cure it before it goes bad the next ingredient you're going to need is your ham cure now country hams are a kind of a harken back to the way meat was cured before mechanical refrigeration and so the the basis of your ham care needs to be salt you can't cure him with totally all salt but a lot of folks add other ingredients to it as well this is a basic hand cure that we use it's eight pounds of salt 2 pounds of brown sugar there's a little bit of black pepper and red pepper as well some paprika in there as well now a question I often get is can we do a sugar cure whenever you add sugar to your ham cure that's what they're going to it's considered a sugar cure do not mix up the the ingredients where you're adding more sugar than salt or your ham will spoil like I said this is a basic ham cure this is about 10 pounds of cure will do about a hundred pounds worth of green ham here we have two veterans the 4-h country ham project that are going to help us apply the cure to these hams we have set out what we need prior to the applying of the cure we have our paper here which is a just a typical wax list butcher paper a common mistake for hrs and amateur ham cures make is getting butcher paper that is wax we want the moisture to escape from this ham and a waxed paper will not allow the moisture to escape you got to realize these fresh hams are roughly 70 to 75 percent water and we're going to lower that percentage of water down to around 50 so we need a way for that to get away from the ham that moisture get away from the ham other things that you can use a grocery store paper bags work well for this this method of curing another question we often get can I use an old fertilizer bag an old feedbag or something along those lines it's not recommended obviously fertilizer it contains some chemicals that are toxic to human health as well as if use an old feedbag chances are your hams going to taste like whatever feed was in there we're going to begin curing her ham by working on the hock of the ham our assistant here is going to show you a good way to help get more cure in the hock is to gently start to separate the skin from the meat of the of the hock as well as around the bone putting your fingers in there just to gently separate those the the membrane that surrounds the skin and the meat there just so you can pack more cure in there now to begin with she's going to grab a couple handfuls of of cure and she's going to start stuffing it in here this is the most critical part of curing a ham is making sure you get enough cure into this hock as if the ham spoils during the curing process typically it is lack of cure getting into the hop getting into the stifle joint next step once we get enough cure in the hock usually about four or five tablespoons what is enough to begin the curing process in the hock we're going to take the remainder of the cure and we're going to start to put it on all the lean exposed lean portions of the ham including the butt face and over here on the ham collar as well and so the girls are going to start applying the the cure to it and this is this is not a very difficult part you're just going to put it on there make sure you kind of Pat it in and rub it in there sometimes the cure if you got a dry cure you can add a just a little bit of water to it to make it feel like it's moist to the touch and that will help with the the cure adhere to the hams as well a good kind of tip is once you start the curing process if your eyes itch or your nose itches you might want to wash your hand before you do that there's enough salt and pepper on this that if you do scratch your eyes or eat your nose that it's going to be quite painful the next step is we've applied all the cure to our ham is now we need to wrap to him in the wacks less paper that we started out with to begin with is probably easiest to get your your paper kind of a diamond shape bring your bottom corner over your shank you're going to have a short side here and fold that over like so bring your other corner over and then we start to bring the top over as well and if a little bit of the ham is exposed that's no problem once you've brought the corner over a small piece of tape can be used to hold the paper in place next thing we're going to do is kind of spin the hem around grab a ham saw these can be purchased on the internet they're commonly referred to as ham socks or ham sake nets and what you want to do is there's a seam at the very end of the ham that you want to make sure go straight across the hawk just open up our ham sock kind of slide it over once again adjusted make sure you got your seam right over the end of your hock and these ham socks fit tight so and but they will stretch the next step we're going to do once we get to him into the sock and this is where if you're working with for a charge the younger kids may need some help as the ham is pretty heavy right now as I start to shake the ham down into the sock holding the top okay and then kind of bunch up your your sock in and if you start to kind of smooth the ham skin upwards that helps straighten out the skin that's underneath the ham once you get it to this pork part once you get to him to this part it's ready to be hung in the barn and begin the curing process naturally as the ham begins the curing process which we described the curing process as the cure the salt and the sugar entering into the ham you can see that it's already starting to push some of that water out it roughly takes a ham about two days for every pound of ham for it to cure or a good rule of thumb as a ham this size will take approximately 60 days to cure and so what you're going to see once it's hanging in the barn and we're going to hang it with a hock pointed down this as always so that we get this nice teardrop shape the hams going to start to lose moisture and it's very common to see puddles of water underneath the ham as they're hanging in the ham house that's very common don't panic that's what we want to happen but basically what's happening now is that salt and that sugar mixture is penetrating the muscles in the skin of that ham now what you're not going to see is the peppers that we've added to here they're too big to enter the ham they're going to stay on the surface and they're going to contribute to the overall color of the finished hank our hams have been carrying for approximately 60 plus days in cooler temperatures or if you're doing an ambulance er and spring rolls around it's time to what we call shuck the ham we're going to remove the ham stock we're going to remove the old paper put a brand new sock on the hams and allow them to go through the summer sweat as you can see the girls have uncovered the hams they've taken the old paper off and if you remember how much cure 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 some PAP a custom red pepper a little bit of red pepper red pepper flake of as a cure used in this ham you can see how much of that has penetrated the ham over the over the last 60 days and the red pepper and the black pepper and the paprika stay on the surface another common thing that you will see especially when we have a moist winter or your hams are in a moist environment you'll see the mold beginning to grow on those it's it's a harmless mold it's actually mainly a penicillin type mold it can be easily cleaned off it's it's no big deal just remember that these type of molds nope don't produce toxins they're easily brushed off once the paper is off the ham and the ham is cleaned it's time to put a brand new sock on as you can see we've done here once again paying careful attention we've got the scene right over the face of the hock there so that the ham sits straight we get that nice teardrop shape if you're doing it at home this is the time that the ham could be smoked although in Kentucky hams are either smoked or unsmoked but if you're smoking a ham please be careful this is a cold smoked for these hams so what you're going to do is is make sure your smoker does not get above a hundred to 105 degrees and you can smoke it for however long you want common is is 12 to 24 hours or though although we have heard of individual smoking for greater than 36 hours and basically what we're going to do is rehang the ham once again making sure that we get the hot pointed straight down this one's just a little lopsided here we're getting kind of straightened out we're going to rehang the ham and he's going to go through the summer sweat this is where he's fully cured right now this is where he's going to start to develop his characteristic country ham flavor and aroma as the enzymes start to break down the fats and proteins in this ham he's going to he's going to develop those characteristic flavors in a room here are the aging rooms at the University of Kentucky we try to maintain the temperature in our aging rooms at roughly seventy to seventy to seventy-five degrees which is going to help produce that characteristic country ham flavor and aroma one of the things that we can do at UK is control the humidity in these rooms we try to maintain a relative humidity of around sixty percent which prevents a mold growth mainly so that we don't have to clean the mold off of the finished ham we will age our hands anywhere from six months to nine months so what you're viewing here mostly hands in rumor roughly around nine months old Oh you

Channel: UK College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment

Views: 1,050,678

Rating: 4.8424635 out of 5

Keywords: sustainability, sustainable development, organic food, farming, livestock, agri, uk agriculture, kentucky, agriculture, agriculture jobs, agricultural, what is agriculture, health, educational, research, nutrition, cooking, kentucky proud, swine, country ham, pig, bacon, meat processing, processing, drying, aging, old-time, vintage, meat, butcher, Smokehouse (Cuisine), preserving, cure, sugar, ham, hamhock, pork, food, dinner

Id: qcwu6K4crHc

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/CisterPhister]

Great video. Wish he'd sliced some off of a finished ham and eaten it.

[u/cikaga]

Getur done... Seriously, cool video.

[u/Nupaloopa]

So the first part seems like it is for the beginner. The second part though? How do I keep it 70-75 degrees for that long?