{"id":47,"date":"2009-08-09T12:18:32","date_gmt":"2009-08-09T17:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/?p=47"},"modified":"2009-09-26T08:06:13","modified_gmt":"2009-09-26T13:06:13","slug":"ham-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"Ham Day!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was the day to take down my salt cured ham<\/a>.\u00a0 There’s nothing magical about August 9th as the day the ham would be ready, I just had time to do it today.<\/p>\n

I cut it down and brought it into the house to work on.\u00a0 Everything looked, felt, and smelled good.\u00a0 The sack was dry and almost crunchy from all the salt permeating it.\u00a0 It was firm and unyielding to the touch.\u00a0 It smelled wonderful, like ,…well…, like salt-cured\u00a0 meat.\u00a0 A rich salty, brown sugar aroma, almost a smoky scent, even though it wasn’t smoked.<\/p>\n

Here it is, still in the sack ready to be opened:<\/p>\n

\"Still<\/p>\n

And here it is unwrapped:<\/p>\n

\"Unwrapped1\"<\/p>\n

\"Unwrapped2\"<\/p>\n

Now it’s ready to clean.\u00a0 I just put it in the sink and rinse and scrub all the salt and spices off.\u00a0 There was very little mold, often these will be pretty nasty looking before cleaning.\u00a0 As you can see in the first picture above the skin on the shank has dried hard, almost like those rawhide chew toys you can buy for your dog.<\/p>\n

Once it’s clean, it’s time to slice it.\u00a0 I stand it shank up like this:<\/p>\n

\"Slicing1\"<\/p>\n

And start slicing vertically from the right, cutting the slices away from the bone horizontally as I go.<\/p>\n

\"Slicing2\"<\/p>\n

Look at the rich dark red color of the meat!\u00a0 It looks like this was a successful curing.<\/p>\n

I work my way over taking vertical slices until I reach the shank bone that is going up and down, and then cut away all the odd shapes bits that I can from the bone.\u00a0 I also sliced a bunch of paper thin vertical slices to use like proscuitto that you’d get from your deli.\u00a0 Sliced thin like that the taste is indistinguishable from a fine proscuitto. \u00a0\u00a0 You can sample as you slice, it’s fully cured and ready to eat.<\/p>\n

After I got done cutting, this is what I had:<\/p>\n

\"All<\/p>\n

On the right a stock pot with the bone and any scraps, ready to be made into stock.\u00a0 Next to that the big slices for use as ham steaks.\u00a0 Then the odd shaped bits for use in soup or stew.\u00a0 Finally paper thin slices laid between wax paper for using like prosciutto.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Altogether I ended up with 6 quarts of meaty stock, about 2 1\/2 pounds of ham steaks, about a pound of ham chunks, and about 3\/4’s of a pound of thin slices.\u00a0 About 4 1\/2 pounds of meat altogether from the 17 pound ham I started with.\u00a0 You lose almost all the water in the meat from curing it, and the bone is heavy too.<\/p>\n

The meat you have left is intensely flavored though.\u00a0 You won’t sit down and eat a couple slices of it like you would with a grocery store ham.<\/p>\n

We traditionally cook it with hominy like this:<\/p>\n

\"Cooking\"<\/p>\n

That’s enough ham for 4 people easily, I got carried away and fixed way too much for Debbie and me.\u00a0 The ham flavors the hominy with its rich salty and smoky taste.<\/p>\n

Was it good?\u00a0 Oh, yes! The ham journey that started last November has reached a successful conclusion!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was the day to take down my salt cured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","category-farming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chuckzumbrun.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}