How To Cure And Smoke Fresh Ham

how's it going today everybody so this is Dan with the rat boy Homestead and today I'm going to show you step by step very simply how to take fresh hams so not cured or smoked or anything raw fresh ham and turn it into delicious ham like you buy at the grocery store that you can just reheat in your oven very simply um the other videos I've found when I was learning how to do this I didn't I got confused with and I messed up a lot of stuff so hopefully this video will help you guys cut out the learning curve very simple Brian it's super easy step by step so let's get started so the first thing you're going to need to know is your ingredients there's just a few very simple basic ingredients that you're gonna need the first thing you're going to need is your hams you're going to need fresh hams I like to do two hams in a bucket in a five gallon plastic bucket this is a food grade bucket but if you're just doing one ham just half this recipe half the amount of water um this recipe will fill or cover these hams so it'll come up to a couple gallons in there so you're going to need your fresh ham fresh uncured on smoked hams you're going to need brown sugar you're going to need pink here now this people consider this a curing salt but this isn't like the salt like Himalayan pink salt this is a special cure you're going to need just plain salt I like to use plain salt and not the iodized salt you're also going to need um just pickling spice now I like to use this brand this ball brand it tastes really great but you can use whatever pickling spice you want and you're also going to need a large pot that'll hold at least minimum one gallon of water to make your brine in so from there let's get started over at the stove all right so now we're over at the stove as you can see we've got all our ingredients set on here so the first thing you're going to need is your one gallon of water just regular water it doesn't have to be anything special just regular water put that in our pot there's that go ahead and turn that on high and get it oh you're going to want to bring this it doesn't really have to get up to a boil just enough to where your salt and your brown sugar dissolve so next thing we're going to go ahead and add is two cups of brown sugar one and a half cups of our plain salt one half cup of our pickling spice and eight teaspoons of our pink salt pink here again from there we'll just go ahead and stir until everything is dissolved and this should turn a nice pink color so we'll get that done and I'll get back with you once this is all dissolved it's important while you're doing this to make sure you keep it moving until all that sugar and salt is dissolved it can burn on the bottom so I just like to continuously slowly stir until you notice everything is good and dissolved all right so now that our brine um is heated up and everything is completely dissolved um you'll be able to tell it's got a nice um brownish pink look to it from the brown sugar and the curing salt um the next thing you're going to want to do is let this completely cool you don't want to put this into our hams until this is completely cooled or it'll sear the outside of the ham and the the brine won't be able to penetrate into the meat so being I live in Minnesota and it's about 35 degrees oh I'm gonna go set this outside and let it cool and we'll get back with you all right guys now the next step in this process is going to be you want to take your I like using a white plastic pail food grade five gallon bucket with a a gamma lid so they're just the lids that thread on but you can use any um plastic or glass container you just want to stay away from using anything metallic anything metal anything aluminum because that pure salt will react with that and do bad things so you're going to want to put your hands in here now I like to put them like this one is a bone side down like this so there's as little surface area contacting the bucket as possible that way that Brian can get around everything and similarly when you lay this in there trying to make this little contact surface between your second ham and the first ham as possible now I should note as well you can go ahead and use any pork to do this ham isn't really ham until it's um cured or brined and cured and smoked is when it really turns into ham so if you don't have an actual fresh cut of ham you can buy a just a pork butt from your local grocery store do the same recipe it's gonna taste just like ham so next thing you're going to want to do so I've got these guys just set in the bucket next thing you want to do this brine is cooled so you're going to want to pour this in careful not to Splash and spell you can probably see that nice red color of that Brian now steaming a little bit but it's it's cooled off it's not gonna um sear the outside or anything like that go ahead and dump that in bring them out to make a mess and there's some stuff still stuck in so what you're going to want to do is I just go ahead and fill this back up it's going to take approximately another gallon to fill this and I just go until the hams are are covered in there so it's going to be approximately two gallons of water in this pail so I'm gonna go fill this back up and we'll add some more I like to add cold water back in foreign so here's approximately another gallon of water you want to make sure you get all your pickling spice which is why I basically rinse this bucket out with my next water and it might not take the full gallon this isn't a perfect science here so right about there that ham is covered I'm gonna go and Spoon out the rest of the spice now there ain't much in there we'll just go ahead and add the rest again not an exact sign so this is going to be approximately [Music] two gallons of water into here and again you just want to make sure your hams are completely submerged um in your brine that you don't have anything sticking out just kind of nestle them in there you don't want it like really pressing the other too much so then what you're going to want to do is go ahead and thread your lid on and these are the the gamma Lids I was talking about they sell these at Menards or anywhere it's nothing too special but they're a nice lid that seals and it's fairly airtight so you're going to thread that on and then the reason I like using these is I like to give these buckets a shake then because obviously your concentrated Brian is now sitting on the bottom so I'll just kind of pick it up and give a little bit of a shake hopefully it doesn't spill too bad and there you go that's your that's your brine those these hams will now sit in here for seven full days so I won't count today because it's already after three o'clock so seven full days starting tomorrow and then we'll go ahead and get these smoked so I'll see you guys in seven days but for you guys will be like the snap of a finger I should note that you want to leave these in a a cold place obviously so um in your refrigerator is ideal right now in Minnesota it's mid 30s so it's refrigerator temp outside I'm just gonna go ahead and set this on my deck all right everybody so it's now been the seven days that these um hams have been sitting in our brine so the next thing we're going to want to do is take them out and rinse them off so you want to rinse off all that brine off the outside otherwise when you smoke it your hams are going to be really salty because all that salt will stay right on the outside all right let's get things out and get them rinsed a smaller one here so you're going to notice the nice pink color that the meat has taken on from that here that lets you know it's sat long enough and it's it's going into the meat so that's what you're looking for so I just use cool water you don't have to scrub or anything but you just want to rinse off all the outside stuff here and then I don't season my hams with anything right now I don't put anything on the outside I just put them on just like this you'll notice all these small uh pickling spices you want to get them off let's roll it off and I like to set them over on a on a rack here and I put these grates down it just makes it easier to get on and off the smoker once these are cooked we'll get the second one out here stuff rinsed off listen if you don't get every last pickling slice that's not the end of the world but you want to get the bulk of them off I'm actually going to be smoking four hams today um beginning part of this video I ended up out off camera making a second batch of Brine and going ahead and doing the last two hams I had so but that's all you need to do just give it a good rinse and then set it on your tray all right guys so what we're going to be using today is just my Pit Boss I believe this is the 1850 the larger Sportsman um series from Pit Boss and I've just got it set at 200 degrees and I'm using Pit Boss competition um pellets as well as I've got a smoke tube in here with a large chunk of meat like this I like using a smoke tube and I've just got Mesquite pellets loaded into that smoke tube so that's all I'm doing here nothing's fancy you can use any smoker you have a stick burner um one of the Bradleys that takes the pucks anything will work you want to hold right around that 185 to 200 degrees so let's get these hams on okay all right we've got our hams out here let's go ahead and put them on so I'm gonna go ahead and put just a single one on this side and the rack with three hands on on the left hand side you know the left hand side is the coolest side most consistent Heat center is obviously very hot where the fire pot is and all the way to the right is kind of a medium so I'll have to rotate these hams around to get a nice even cook but we'll go ahead and put these on again using these racks it makes it really easy to do to move things around so go ahead and get that one on kind of slide it as far this way as I can tray out of the way I'm gonna grab this one the big heavy one [Music] hopefully the lid shuts slide it in there this way here all in the back hopefully without touching yeah so I don't think our lid is going to close so I'm gonna have to rearrange these already and bump this one back smoking your eyes will really get you put this guy here there we go this one ahead a little bit all right oh that smoke will really get you from that smoke tube okay next thing we're going to go ahead and do is install our temp probe so um these temp probes are just an ink bird um Wi-Fi or not Wi-Fi but Bluetooth thermometer so I'm just going to go ahead and plug these guys in I've got three of them so we're just going to kind of guess and we're shooting for an internal temp of 165 on these is what we're going for so let's kind of place these around doesn't really matter which ones just trying to avoid the bone and getting them into the center of the of the meat the best we can so being that this side's hotter I'm going to start with two over here [Music] now we're going to let these go for about two hours before we start checking them and once we start checking them we'll let them go or we'll check them about every hour until they're done I'm guessing this is going to take about six hours it's pretty cold out today but I'll let you guys know at the end how long it did actually take so you'll have an idea all right so we got our hams on the smoker we're gonna let them go for a couple hours and then like I said we'll start checking it every hour the only other thing left to do is I like to use apple cider vinegar in a um in a spray bottle with about two-thirds apple cider vinegar one third just plain water um about two-thirds away through the cook once the hams start looking like they're drying out a little bit I'll miss them with that solution or that you know that solution I guess and what that'll do is it'll kind of give it a little bit of a glaze on the outside and it kind of keeps them from drying out I don't put any other glaze on my hams if you guys want to go ahead but I just like to do this it's simple and easy so on our first check we'll get back to you all right we're at the two hour mark let's jump in here and see where we're at so the ones on this side are at 88 degrees and the ones on this side are at 77 degrees so we're definitely going to want to flip-flop these around but let's take a look I don't plan that we'll need to miss them yet but let's see so you can see they're looking good the smoke tube's just about burnt out we got a nice getting a nice golden color there so we'll go ahead and rearrange these guys and get this door shut so we don't lose too much heat we're also going to spin them like this to help with that even Heating trying to do this relatively quick to not let too much heat out but my temp probes are all wound up here there we go all right [Music] all right they're looking good though so I'll get back with you guys I'll continue to monitor this every hour flip-flopping things around but I'll get back to you when I'm going to um Mist them down with our apple cider vinegar water solution um I'll see let you know what that looks like all right so we're at the four hour mark here and all of our hams are at 125 degrees um if you look they're starting to get a golden color to them they're darkening up so we're gonna go ahead and and hit them with our apple cider vinegar water combination here put them all down real good [Music] now being that they're so even in temp I'm not going to rotate them this time we'll probably go ahead and rotate them next time but next time we check in you'll be able to see the coloration difference that this apple cider vinegar makes on them all right so we are coming up on the seven hour mark here this is taking a bit longer than I thought but that's smoking meat for you so let's take a look right now we're sitting at about 147 degrees on all of them so I have rotated them once since we spoke last so I don't think we're gonna mess with them but let's take a peek we've got our apple cider vinegar here in case we need it yep these are getting a nice dark color and you can kind of see the almost the glaze that they're getting on the outside so we'll go ahead and hit them again with this [Music] all right so we'll let them go now until they're until they're done all right guys so we're sitting about eight hours now and I'm glad I double checked because these hams actually only have to hit an internal temp of 145 so we're looking about 150 155-ish now so unfortunately I did let them go just a little bit too long no big deal it's not going to hurt anything by any means um but I did miss Spike speak 145 is the internal temp you're shooting four on these so let's go ahead and pull them off go ahead and lay them on our trays here looking delicious some rack here is a second rack all right guys so I hope you enjoyed this video with me here today um hopefully help you and your next time you try to make some fresh hams Easter is coming up for us so hopefully it uh this will turn out well for you like I said I did end up actually overdoing these by a touch um by about 10 degrees actually but they'll still be great uh 145 again is the internal temperature shooting for but uh please throw me a comment on something you've done with ham or would like to try in the future and please subscribe if you haven't already um do a lot of videos on the homestead here of cooking some meat and a lot of stuff on the Pit Boss so if you enjoyed that kind of content let me know and until next time guys you have a good one

Channel: The Rapaway Homestead

Views: 18,272

Keywords: Smoking fresh ham, Curing ham, Curing and smoking ham, Fresh ham, fresh ham on pellet grill, smoking ham, ham recipe, How to make ham, how to make a ham, how to make fresh ham, how to make easter ham, How to make ham on a pellet grill, Fresh ham on a pellet grill, making ham on a pit boss pellet grill, smoking ham on a pit boss, easy ham recipe, easy smoked ham recipe, pit boss, traeger, easter ham

Id: 991J_mU2Oac

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2023