Making ham (and bacon)

Making (city) ham

City ham is wet cured in a brine for about a week, then heated for final processing (either sous vide or smoking). It's different than country ham, which is salted and then hung for months while it gradually loses weight.   The spiral cut honey ham or the ham on your ham and cheese sandwich is a city ham.  Proscuitto or Jamon Serrano are country hams.  Sally and I had a great rosemary ham at Industrial Eats in Buellton when we took a charcuterie class from Jake at Valley Piggery.

That's a nice piece of meat

Ham starts with the hind leg of a pig. A whole shank is 15-20 lbs, so I got just the shank end (that's the end closer to the foot, or trotter), about 8-9 lbs, conveniently boned out by the butcher.  The butt or sirloin end (closer to the hip) is more complex muscle wise, and harder to make a nice carveable piece of meat out of.
So here's my shank end, ready for the curing mix

I got my ham from Michael at Ventura Meat Company.  They have good pork from humanely raised pigs.

Starting the cure

City ham is cured in brine, and to make the curing more even, you inject the brine into the middle of the meat with a large syringe. Otherwise, the outer part of the ham would be very salty, and the middle not so salty.  The brine in this case was a mixture of brown sugar, salt, curing salt, rosemary and garlic.

The ham sits in the brine for a week. I put it in the refrigerator door, and every time you open or close the refrigerator, the brine swirls around so it stays nicely mixed.

It comes out of the cure

Just came out of the brine

After a week, you pull it out of the brine and rinse it a couple of times to reduce the saltiness of the surface.  If you've done it right, it has an even pinkish color from the curing salts. Yes, nitrites are your friend here, and so-called "uncured" bacon and ham uses celery juice which has a lot of nitrites in it.  With modern chemistry, we can control the amount of nitrite to just what's needed to prevent bacteria growth, but to minimize the formation of nitrosamines (if you fry or grill the ham).

You then need to let it sit for at least a day in the refrigerator to dry out. At this point, you have a decision - you can just heat it and use it, you can sous vide it, or you can smoke it. You could probably eat it at this point: the curing kills any bacteria, but it's kind of gelatinous and squishy (like raw meat, but tougher).  I decided to do the latter two, so I cut my cured ham in half.

After sitting for a week - check out that nice color and texture

Final steps

The first half, I vacuum packed, and put into the sous vide cooker at 65C.

Bagged and ready

Cooking at 65C

And this is the final product

 Smoking

The second half, I smoked at 180F to an internal temp of 145F.  I think it could have gone slightly higher.. the fat is still kind of gelatinous.  Maybe 150F would be better - it's not like the temperature calibration on the probes is all that good, so maybe it was lower than the sous vide, which is the perfect texture.

Smoked city ham

And, bacon too!

Bacon out of the smoker

I also got 5lbs of pork belly to make bacon out of.  I tried two different cures: a straight up maple sugar style, and a more complex molasses, juniper berry, and other seasonings.  Those sat in plastic bags in the refrigerator for a week, then got a few hours of apple wood smoke to 150F, and are ready to cook and eat.

Ready to eat!

Shortened dipole for 40 meters

The question comes up on the tower talk mailing list about using a single 30m dipole (actually 15m long) for 40 meters with a matching network. Is the gain significantly less? Is the matching network a problem.  4nec2 answers these questions.  The models were lossless (for the antenna, not for the matching network), and modeled as 10 meter and 7.5 meter long dipoles fed in the center, with the element radius of 1 cm.

Full size is 2.08 dBi, Shorty is 1.75 dBi, mostly because of the slightly wider main lobe for the shortened antenna.


Here's the gains of the full size dipole vs the 75% length dipole (with the matching network):

Gain of 75% sized dipole for 40m

Gain of full size dipole for 40m

Now let's look at the impedance of the short antenna and the required matching network

Impedance of 75% dipole around 7 MHz:
Capacitive, about 30 ohms and -350j to -250j ohms

Impedance with the low pass T feed, tuned for 7.15MHz

4nec2 has a neat feature where it will calculate the values for a matching network.  I picked the low pass T, since I knew I'd need some significant series L to compensate the antenna's overall capacitive reactance.  An L network would also work, as would a tapped inductor.

So the series L (about 7.5 uH) compensates for the capacitive reactance (-300j) and brings the resonance to 7.15 MHz.  Here's the VSWR plot for the matched antenna.  Not too bad, the 2:1 bandwidth is about 350 kHz, the 1.5:1 BW is about 180 kHz.

Let's compare that to the VSWR of the original 40m antenna. which has a wider 2:1 bandwidth, 460 kHz, but a narrower 1.5: 1 BW of abotu 150 kHz (because the best match is only 1.4:1 due to the original antenna being a 72 ohm impedance)

Landjaeger is done!

 After fermenting for 2 days, then smoking, then hanging for 2 weeks, the landjaeger is done.  Here's a photo of the fermented sausage hanging in the smoker.  I used apple wood, figuring it's something reasonably local: Landjaeger is a southern German, Swiss, Austrian sausage, and there's plenty of apple trees in the area.  After smoking, I hung it at about 60 degrees/50% RH .

The recipes all say to monitor the mass to know when it is dry enough; so it started weighing about 35 ounces, then a few days later was down to 26, and still pretty squishy.  By a week, it was down to 21 ounces, and yesterday, it was at 17 ounces, about half the original weight. As it dried, it got darker, which is nice, because I was afraid that I hadn't put enough smoke into it, but it turns out that it's more about oxidation (I assume) than smoke that does the color. 

And here it is in cross section (because, hey, you have to cut some off and eat it!).  Tastes like landjaeger I've had before, so it's a winner. If you've not had landjaeger, it's basically kind of like jerky, serving the same general purpose of a dried, preserved meat for traveling.   I'm thinking about getting ready to do a slow fermented sausage next.. salami.

While we're looking at food from southern Germany, I also made some sauerkraut from a leftover half a head of red cabbage.  It's crunchy and sweet, just like it's supposed to be.

Landjaeger & Pate

The landjaeger has been stuffed and fermented for about 2 days now. A mixture of beef and pork with spices, stuffed into hog casings. (we had fun with the extra casings.. now I know where balloon animals came from).  I don't have official wooden landjaeger molds, so I squished them between a couple sheet pans for 48 hours.  The bacteria inoculation wants to ferment at 80F or so, which is convenient since it's been 80 in the garage for the past few days. 

You're supposed to dry the sausages for a bit, so we did that today, giving me a chance to take a picture.  Tomorrow evening, after another 24 hours of fermentation, (and I might add, they smell like they are fermenting.. a distinct acidic odor), I hit them with low temperature smoke for 4-6 hours, and then they go to cure for a couple weeks at 50-60 F (e.g. the temperature of the wine).

I got ambitious yesterday.. watching the DVD that comes with Jacque Pepin's new book I saw how you can bone out a chicken while keeping the skin intact to make a ballotine. It actually worked (although I'm not nearly as proficient and speedy as Jacque).

And, I made a pate (my first)... a pork tenderloin with a pork forcemeat around it, with a garnish of andouille. Tastes pretty good.

Viognier dessert wine

While making the Landjaeger, I opened a couple of bottles of Viongier dessert wine for a horizontal tasting. Both from Santa Ynez, both from 2010, from Bridlewood and Dascomb. What a difference.., The Dascomb was sweeter and much more complex, caramel, apple, etc.   The Bridlewood... apple juice.  Really.. that's the first impression for the Bridlewood.. tastes like apple juice.  The Dascomb has the apple-y flavor, but has more to it.

Interesting.

And the sausage is curing in the garage.  It needs to ferment for 48 hours at 80 F, and conveniently, it's been hot outside, so the garage is in the 75-85 range.   After that, 10-14 days of drying at 50-60 sort of temperature.  I forgot the sugar.. the recipe calls for dextrose, which I didn't have, and I was going to substitute sucrose or honey, but I forgot.  Oops.  Oh well.  Those hardy Swiss didn't have buckets of glucose sitting around 100 years ago.  The meat probably has enough sugar in it to feed the bacteria.

(dessert wine tasting was AFTER the sausage making, so consumption of wine had nothing to do with the omission of sugar)

Canadian Bacon

I made some Canadian Bacon using the recipe from Ruhlman's Charcuterie.  It's pretty simple, you cure in a brine (with pink salt as the curing agent) for a couple days, let it dry for a day, then smoke it to an internal temp of 150F.  The brine has a few spices in it, but basically, this is a smoked cured ham (made from pork loin).

It came out pretty much as expected.  There's a small non-pink spot in the middle: perhaps the brine didn't diffuse quite far enough in in the two days?  With the commercial product, they pump the brine into the meat under pressure to get better perfusion.

I want to try Kassler Ripchen which is a similar product, but in theory is smoked first, then brined.  Or maybe it's cured, smoked, brined.  It's hard to get a straight story online: there's tons of recipes, the vast majority of which are basically identical to the Canadian Bacon.  The original Kassler process is about 100 years old, and may have done things that aren't good practice today.

Also on the list to try is Landjaeger: a dried, cured, smoked sausage made from pork and beef. Think of it as southern German jerky.  It's a dry cured sausage, but not the months hanging like salami, just a couple weeks; but it is fermented (unlike the Pancetta).  I also have a tub of sauerkraut fermenting in the wine locker.

More Charcuterie (Saucisson, a'la Pepin)

More sausage...

I got a Jacque Pepin cookbook for Father's day, and there was a series of recipes in there for a country saucisson.  A pork sausage with garlic, red wine, and seasoning.  It looked good, so I got out the grinder, a kilo packet of frozen pork shoulder, some fatback, and went for it.  One of the recipes called for chanterelles or similar.  I didn't have those, but I did have dried porcini, which I like the flavor of, so I used those.   It's a mild cure.. add curing salt, cure in the refrigerator for 2-7 days.

I wrapped the sausage in plastic wrap and foil, per the recipe, and let it cure.  It's been a week now, so time to test it.  I saw the recipe for saucisson in brioche (sort of a fancy pigs in blankets when you get right down to it) and decided to make it for breakfast, although it's really more of a dinner or lunch dish, but I was hungry this morning.  I didn't want to make bread dough for the brioche, but I did have puff pastry in the freezer, so I figured I could wrap the 2"x10" log o'sausage in the puff pastry and bake it.

OK.. it tastes pretty good.  Distinct red wine taste (I used a cheap Apothos red which isn't great to drink), some heat (I think I put some pepper in), nice earthy porcini taste.  Very, very different than the usual breakfast sausage or my standard spicy Italian sausage.  The puff pastry, though, pulled away.  Probably need bigger vents to let the steam escape during baking. Or maybe do smaller chunks of meat, or stretch the pastry, or, gosh, actually make brioche dough?

Froze the rest.  Pepin's recipes call for either roasting next to potatoes and onions (yum), or poaching in hot water and using with potatoes to make a potato salad.  So I vacuum packed the remaining three logs, and we'll see how it goes.  Some sausage freezes better than others.

The andouille worked great.. I did a peppers and onions saute with andouille this week and it was wonderful.  Next batch needs more heat, though.

Love that vacuum packer.. I also  packed 4 pounds of pork chops cut from a 8 pound loin that Sally got at Costco.  The other 2 pound chunks are going to become Kassler Rippchen and Canadian Bacon.  The former needs to be smoked before curing, the latter needs curing before smoking. I need to get some juniper berries, and I need 3 or 4 days to do the curing.  Sort of a German and Canadian take on what you can do with a lean pork loin!