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When you cure and smoke your own ham, you control what goes into it. You’ll be joining a long line of ham makers and ham lovers stretching back millennia. And when you lift the lid of your grill or smoker to behold your smoke-bronzed porky masterpiece, the satisfaction is off the charts. Once you make ham yourself, I doubt you’ll go back to storebought.
Here’s what you need to know:
How to Cure & Smoke Ham
The ham: I like to use a shoulder ham. Cut from the hog’s forequarter (just under the Boston butt), it’s half the size of a full hind leg ham, typically weighing 9 to 10 pounds and can be cured and smoked in a week. A shoulder ham is still a magisterial cut of meat—it never fails to impress when presented and carved.
The cure: Hams come dry-cured (like Italian prosciutto) and wet-cured—the latter soaked in a brine made of water, salt and sodium nitrite. Often, you add sugar or honey for sweetness and bay leaves and peppercorns for spice. The advantage of wet curing is that it’s quicker, and you can speed up the process by injecting part of the brine into the meat (thus curing it both from the outside-in and inside-out). This is the sort of ham served on most American holiday tables.
The curing salt: Ham owes its alluring pink color and flavor to a curing salt called sodium nitrite. This naturally occurring chemical got a bad rap a few decades ago, when some poor science claimed it caused cancer. Scientists have long since exonerated sodium nitrate, but the stigma remains. Sodium nitrite is often sold in the form of “pink salt” on account of the pink coloring added to it to keep you from confusing it with regular table salt. (It’s also called Prague powder.) In large quantities, sodium nitrite can be toxic (that’s why you don’t want to sprinkle it on your steak), but in moderate quantities, it preserves the meat, turning it pink, adding luscious umami flavors in the process.
The smoke: The other element that makes ham, ham is wood smoke. In the old days, smoke served as much as a preservative as a flavoring. Today, we love the rich smoky flavor and how it enhances the meat. You can use most any hardwood for smoking: hickory is traditional in the South; apple and cherry in the Midwest. Some people even smoke ham over corncobs.
The grill / smoker: Commercial hams are traditionally smoked in a smokehouse. You don’t need that—or even a smoker. You can smoke your ham in a kettle grill. Of course, if you have a water or box smoker, offset barrel smoker, pellet grill, or kamado, the process will be even easier. Sorry folks, you can’t smoke a ham on a gas grill.
Recipe
All of us here at Barbecuebible.com wish you a happy Easter! Make the following brown sugar-cured, smoked shoulder ham, and you’ll be happy not only at Easter, but any time of the year!
Check out our 1000+ Recipes section here on Barbecue Bible.Com
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