How To Cure Ham

I want to talk to you today about curing ham. Curing is actually prolonging the life of our meat. Years ago, you know, curing the meats with salt on the ships so the meat was able to keep longer, but nowadays, it's trendy to have cured meats on your charcuterie.

So, how are we going to cure our meat? Let's have a look. So, we look in our weight of our meat first. So if we've got a 10-pound piece of ham, we're looking at about 10 days of salting our meat.

So, 10 days of ham in the fridge completely immersed in salt. What we're doing, we're drawing all of the liquid out of our ham. So, everyday, we're checking and we're pulling our tray out.

So, from day 1, we're checking our salt and we're just checking the liquid content from the ham and we're draining it out. So we've got 6 pounds of meat on the sixth day, we're checking the final stage. We're taking off all our excess liquid and what we're doing, we're washing off the excess salt.

Then we're going to cover it with lard. Again, that will moisten our meat and we're able to coat our meat with cracked black pepper and some dried thyme or some dried herbs. Then we're going to cover it with some muslin, really, really cover it up and we're going to literally hang our meat for fairly 6 months in room temperature, it's ideal for us to be in a safe environment for our ham.

So, we're looking to cover it in muslin really tight and to gain all that flavor and for us to ensure that we are curing our meat the best way possible. So, 6 days, 6 pound piece of meat, we're curing it with our salt. We're taking all that moisture out, then we're drying it out.

We're adding our lard to it, we're adding our black pepper and we're covering it in muslin and we're tying it up and we're hanging it and we're forgetting about it. Then, after 6 months, minimum 6 months, we're taking our meat and we're trying our piece of meat. And that's how I cure my ham. .