Life's too short to eat bad food - Me

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Ham


I would not eat green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam-I-am - Dr. Suess
I grew up a Kosher home.  The first time I had a cured pork product at a classmate and neighbor's home.  It was bad baloney on white bread with mayo.  Served with milk.  I wanted to vomit, but I was nice.

It wasn't until my mother passed and we stopped being Kosher that I learned how bacon and eggs taste (and the bacon doesn't taste that way anymore - what do you think?).

My admiration for cured pork grew as quality improved and imports increased, but I have become a firm believer that the best is done yourself.  I wrote of the first attempt at a home brined and smoked ham earlier.  This one may have been better.  When you put the ham in a sandwich you taste the ham, not just the mustard.

It is worth the effort and I got a big bone and trimmings for pea soup!

3 comments:

LIVE TO EAT said...

That is one beautiful ham!

Natalie Sztern said...

It took The Art of A Pig to get me here: imagine!! I am in the process of trying to home cure here in the North and it seems to be a really hard thing to do: like Pink Salt/Prague Powder #1 is not sold here...and murmurings from the butchers are 'u aren't s'posed to do that at home'...any way I am almost to the point of ordering off the net and spending 7 bucks to ship a package at the cost of 1.50. Seriously tho I cannot believe the difficulty in getting this one ingredient...the laws in selling a curing product to a non-liscensed butcher is quite a strictly regulated system; I can speak more on it another time. Draconian might be a definition.

Scotty Harris said...

Natalie, it's not my favorite curing product, but do you get Morton Salt's "Tender Quick" there? We have it in Supermarkets.





Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke

Life's too short to eat bad food -
Me