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 LoinThis cure calculator can be used for measured dry cures or equilibrium brine (wet) cures. Measured dry cures are also sometimes referred to as EQ Cures.
It is designed for the experienced curer – those who will know to adjust the meat weight for any bone. Those who realise that meat takes a very long time to reach equilibrium in an eq brine.
They will also be aware of curing safely and using a sufficiently strong brine to protect the meat whilst it is curing when using a brine cure.
The input to the form is in grams rather than lb and oz. This is for purely practical purposes; for example, 2.5% of 1000gm is far easier to calculate than 2.5% of 2lbs2oz. It also uses weight for all measurements; this is because the volumes of solids are variable.
As many people cure using a brine weight that’s half the weight of the meat, the calculator asks the total brine weight that you require and then calculates the ingredients for that amount of brine.
To convert US measures to grams you can use our:
US measures to grams converter
Continue reading Universal Cure calculator
See also:
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 Beef
For those that don’t know, Bresaola is an air-dried beef that originates in the north of Italy. In the past, I’ve always made it using Jason Molinari’s recipe from curedmeats.blogspot.co.uk. The recipe below, whilst very different from Jason’s, owes its heritage to his. I’ve removed the cinnamon and clove, reduced the other spices and added a small amount of garlic.
Continue reading Bresaola
Lomo is made from the solid muscle that forms the eye of a pork loin. It starts by cutting the ‘eye’ from a loin of pork.
After removing the ‘tail’ of the pork loin, the loin was dry-cured in a vacuum bag with Spanish smoked paprika, black pepper and garlic for a couple of weeks:
The cured Lomo was rinsed and then dried overnight in the fridge…
Continue reading Lomo embuchadoOriginally posted in 2009...
What springs to mind if I mention Emmet? Is it a Cornish tourist, or maybe the neighbour of Hyacinth Bouquet in the famous sitcom? Well, to any foodie or meat curer it won’t be either; it’ll be the makers of the famous Suffolk Black Ham that used to hold Royal Warrant, Emmett’s of Peasenhall. They’ve been making ham for over 150 years. Whilst there are other black hams, including the famous Bradenham from Wiltshire, Shropshire Black Ham, and a less well-known one from Derbyshire, Emmett’s seems to have become the one people talk about. It’s featured in the press and used to be rolled out on Delia Smith’s TV programmes at Christmas.
Continue reading Black HamAbout a year ago I replied to a comment on Pauline’s Ham and said: “…I have done this cure with a lot less liquid by using a vacuum bag and just putting 100 – 200 ml of brine cure in with the meat (after injecting, of course).” It was my intention, at that time, to write further about this with an explanation and more detail.
Contrary to popular belief, the reason’s not that I’m tight-fisted! There are also some technical reasons why it’s a good idea. They’re not related to injection-curing; it’s the immersion part of the cure that’s the potential cause for concern.
Continue reading Pauline’s Ham in a BagThis is a rolled pancetta – pancetta arrotolata – from a recipe by my mate Larbo who now lives in the US.
It’s unusual as it’s flavoured with orange zest and fennel – not the traditional flavours you expect in pancetta.
The meat was dry-cured for 12 days, rolled and tied, and has been hanging in my air-drying fridge for 27 days.
Allowing for the removal of the skin when it was rolled, it’s lost 22% of its original weight – in supermarket terms it’s been made with 127gms of meat per 100gms pancetta.
Here’s Laurence’s recipe:
Continue reading Pancetta di Larbo
This Pancetta cuts right back on the spices letting the meat shine through.
If you make it, try to get a very thick piece of belly pork from the butcher; the one I used wasn’t really thick enough because the shrinkage is quite considerable. It looks thicker in the photo than it actually is. What looks like green/black mould is actually beneficial white mould on top of the powdered black pepper that I used because I was too lazy to grind the coarse black pepper that I included in the recipe!
Continue reading Pancetta di Thurlaston
