This is my maiden voyage on making/curing ham at home. Been reading about it for a while now and it seems pretty easy. I bought everything I need for it. This first batch is going to be kinda pricey, just from getting all the supplies I need. Now that I have everything it will be basically be free until I need to buy more ingredients. For this first run, I am just using a big pork roast from Winn Dixie(on sale). Once I see how it turns out, then I can tweak my recipe and use some nice pork roasts off of these hogs I keep piling up
Ingredients/supplies needed:
Plastic container: big enough to hold the pork ham, but small enough to fit in your fridge
Turbinado sugar (raw sugar), or brown sugar
Molasses
course salt
Insta cure #1 (pink salt). You can get it here
http://www.sausagemaker.com/curesandcultures.aspx
Ingredients ready to mix
And the meat in the brine
I had to put a saucer to hold it down. I went ahead and sped the process up a bit,if you will. I got my turkey injector and injected the meat full of the brine right when I put it in.
This gets to just hang out in the brine until Thursday. I'll flip it and re-inject and stir the brine a couple times a day until Thursday afternoon.....................
I did a lor of reading, and these 2 articles were the most informative. I sorta combined the 2, and went from there. I also added a few bay leaves, and a dash of red pepper flakes to the brine
http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-cure-ham.html
http://schmidling.com/ham.htm
Please keep us up on how it is going.
Norwegians cure salmon with a sugar/salt combo called gravlox that is delish, they also press it with a cookie skeet weighed down with a couple of dumbels,but they use rocksalt. I make my lemon/tangerine tonic with that sugar in the raw, good stuff.
Looks Good :toast
+2 LOOKS GOOD also gets easier the more you keep doing it.
