Ham experiment

[Whitey Jr]

We recently bought a side of Berkshire Pork, and have having a blast trying all kinds of new recipes. We tried this recipe (loosely based on the excellent cured ham recipe from Habenaro Smoker) on a boneless leg roast a few weeks ago, so this time, we're doing another boneless along with a large hock. I'm only done the intial stage at this point, so I'll be updating as I go along.

Each cut (the boneless leg, and hock) are about 2KG each.



Now, I used 2 litres of water for this recipe, but you may need to alter the cure/water ratio depending on how big your cuts are

•Get 2 litres of water to a gentle boil and add:
•1 Tbsp Juniper Berries - I put the Juniper berries on the cutting board and gave them a whack with the botton of a saucepan to kind of crack them open.
•1/2 Tbsp whole mustard seeds
•1 Tbsp rough ground black pepper
•1/4 Tbsp ground corriander
•1/2 Tbsp crushed red chili flakes
•2 Bay leaves, crumbled
•1/2 head of garlic roughly chopped
•1/4 cup brown sugar
•200ml of pure maple syrup
Mix until you can see the brown sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat. Once the mix has cooled you can add the cure. For this recipe I used Mortons, cause that's what we had. The instructions call for 200g per litre, but experience has taught me that you can pull the Mortons back a bit with no ill effects. For this application I used the follwing:
•2 Litres of water (already added)
•1 and 1/4 cup of Mortons (about 350g)
Figure out what 10% of the mass of your meat is, and set aside the equvilent measurment of brine (both of our cuts add up to 4000g, so I set aside 400ml of brine). Take the brine you set aside and use that to inject the meat as evenly as you can. I picked up a $5 meat injector at the local Canadian Tire.
Put cuts into large freezer bag and pur in brine/cure.



I'm going to let those sit in the cure/brine solution for 6-7 days at as close to 38F as I can get the little bar fridge in the shed. I'll log on again next weekend and follow-up with pictures/instructions on how we smoke/cook. Stay tuned.

-Whitey Jr