Tasso ham is a seasoning ingredient in Cajun cooking. It can be used in gumbo, red beans and rice, jambalaya, etouffee and cooked greens. It is cured, smoked, and heavily seasoned with paprika, garlic and cayenne. A little goes a long way.
Though called ham, it is made from the pork shoulder rather than the leg.
Continue reading Tasso Ham
This is not the confit duck of French tradition, where the legs sit in duck fat as a preserving method.
This is a lighter version that still gives a tender duck with crispy skin, but with less salt and a little less fat. In the four major UK supermarkets, the fat costs more per kilo than the legs!
Continue reading Duck Confit – a lighter version
This cure started with the gift of some cider from Mark at Rockingham Forest Cider. To do this craft product justice I felt that a brine immersion cure was called for – none of your injection cured shortcuts for this ham!
Continue reading Cider HamWhen I wrote about the Kasseler style smoked loin, I said that I’d make some more but use a dry cure rather than a brine.
I started two last month; I’ll smoke one and leave one unsmoked as my wife, Pauline, is not too keen on smoked food.
We’ll use it sliced in place of ham and it may even find its way into the odd bacon butty as it’s a loin version of US bacon! I’ll not be stopping making real British bacon any time soon though – have no fears about that!
Continue reading Hot Smoked Cured Pork LoinWhilst I am a great believer in using locally produced meat from independent suppliers I’m also aware that many people don’t have the income to do this.
I hope to show with this project that you can still make some great products despite this. Many are cheaper than buying them from the supermarket. Yes, the quality may be better with meat produced to higher standards but good products can be made using meat produced on an industrial scale.
This is the piece of meat I bought from a local supermarket that sells pork produced in Britain. It’s around a kilogram of pork loin and cost £4.26 as it was discounted to £4 per kg.
That still may seem like a lot of money to some but the meat it makes can be used instead of cured ham, fried as bacon or be cut into thick slices to use as pork steaks/bacon chops – all of which would be more expensive to buy.
In Germany, it’s called Kasseler and is usually cured with the bones still in; it’s served as bacon chops. Some online references talk of it being smoked, cooked and then stored in brine which seems an odd way of going about things! However the few recipes I can find all make it in the normal way.
Continue reading Kasseler Style Pork
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Preparing the dry-cured corned beef and curing the meat
The dry-cured corned beef after curing
I decided to follow my friend Paul’s instructions for cooking the corned beef. He said to braise it slowly in chicken stock; I hadn’t any defrosted and so used water with the meat sat on a sliced onion.
Continue reading Dry Cured Corned BeefThe dry-cured beef that was put to cure on 29th August has now been curing for 20 days. How did I calculate the cure time? Well, it depends somewhat on the type of cure. Older cures tended to use lots of salt and then cure for a number of days per inch of meat. You still see people advising this online. However, that doesn’t apply in this case as the cure was formulated so that however long it’s left there can only be 2.5% salt in the meat. That’s about the same level as in mild bacon. I’ll braise the meat in liquid which will reduce this level further.
More important is that I chose to cure it for 20 days to give plenty of time for the saltpetre to work. Unlike the sodium nitrite in Cure #1, saltpetre (potassium nitrate) has to react with bacteria in the meat to lose an oxygen molecule and become potassium nitrite. It’s that nitrite that gives the meat protection and its colour.
Continue reading Dry-cured corned beef – 20 Days onMy co-writer, Paul, revised an injection cure to use as a dry cure for beef brisket. He cooked it to eat on St. Patrick’s Day in 2020. I thought of it the other day when we were shopping at a local trade wholesaler, as they had brisket on offer. It seemed an ideal time to make it without risking expensive meat.
I decided to stick close to Paul’s recipe – I trust him in these things. However, I’ve reduced the allspice and increased the juniper to take account of our preferences.
I trimmed the meat:
It’s not pretty now, but see how it turns out…
Continue reading Dry Cured Corned Beef – PreparationIn 2008, I wrote:
In this country, we are used to corned beef out of a tin. The corned beef I am making is more like an unsmoked version of Pastrami. It gets its name from the ‘corn’, grains of coarse salts that are used to cure it. Traditionally made with brisket it can also be made with other cuts – in this case, a piece of topside weighing about 3lb.
Originally posted in 2009:
This ham is ‘in the spirit’ of a traditional Suffolk Black Ham, but made using a simplified curing process.
The famous Suffolk Black Ham made by Emmett’s of Peasenhall is still available to buy, both online and from their shop. They’ve been making ham for over 150 years.
There are other black hams, including the famous Bradenham from Wiltshire, Shropshire Black Ham, and a less well-known one from Derbyshire.
Continue reading Black Ham
