Cured Whole Muscle Meats

@lholder said in Cured Whole Muscle Meat 105 - Ham Basics: Could the ham be hung and dried at this point without thermal processing to produce a country ham or prosciutto style? No, the ham has too much water activity at that point. When dry curing you are not only curing the meat, but also dropping the moisture content to make the meat safe. I have used this method to make a shelf stable dry cured ham that I aged for 5 months before eating. The only reason I didn’t let it age the full 180 days was the wife complained that the cupboard smelled like a BBQ pit. https://virginia-beach.ext.vt.edu/content/dam/virginia-beach_ext_vt_edu/files/4-h/20120223-AGR-EXT-DryCuringVirginiaStyleHam.pdf

Winner, winner chicken dinner! The second breast was noticeably less salty after I accounted for the extra weight of the excess salt water and giblet pack! Excellent flavor. It was almost, and I say almost cautiously, a tad on the salty side. Still curious I looked at the label as Johnathon suggested and found this: Turkey Breast With Ribs, Back Portion, Wing Portion and Neck Skin Containing Approximately 19% Of A Solution Of Turkey Broth, Salt, Sodium Phosphate, Sugar, Flavoring. Gravy Packet Ingredients: Water, Gravy Seasoning (Dextrose, Food Starch-Modified, Rice Flour, Maltodextrin, Hydrolyzed Corn Protein, Rendered Chicken Fat, Salt, Onion Powder, Yeast Extract, Dehydrated Turkey Broth, Dehydrated Cooked Turkey, Xanthan Gum, Natural Flavors (Contains Torula Yeast), Spice, Disodium Inosinate, Disodium Guanylate). It came with a 19% injection already!!! Boy this explains a lot! Thanks Johnathon for pointing me in that direction! I just ordered a 11 lb lobe without it being already pumped and am going to cure this puppy using the exact recipe. I suspect it is going to turn out fantastic!

@ranger-mike I have never done a CB that way, usually put it in a solution. I would suspect that you would use the same amount of cure to weight with appropriate time for the cure to penetrate the thickness of the meat you are curing.

Cured Whole Muscle Meat 103 - Curing Large Cuts Of Meat Attend this entry level class from Meatgistics University by watching the video, reading the article and post any questions you have! Challenges of Curing Large Cuts Curing Large Cuts of meat can be a challenge, as no matter how you do it you are going to have more concerns about even distribution of the cure. This is why when curing larger cuts of meat an injection process is generally recommended. If you try to brine or pickle something the size of a ham you could run into an issue where the cure is going to gas out. You also have the issue of not being able to control exactly how much of the cure and seasoning gets into the meat. What Does Gassing Out Mean? Gassing out happens when the cure converts to gas and escapes the water before it is able to fully penetrate the meat. The problem with trying to cure larger cuts like a ham with just a pickle or brine is that you are relying solely on osmosis so the skin and fat need to allow the sale, seasoning, and nitrite to pass through them to the center of the ham. How To Overcome These Challenges Injecting can help you with both of these issues. First, injecting can get your cure deeply and evenly distributed in the meat right away so you aren’t wasting time waiting for the cure to penetrate the meat. This means that the cure is not converting to gas and escaping the brine solution as we are waiting for our meat to cure. It also allows us to be hyper-accurate with the amount of solution that we are getting into our meat. If we need a 10% pump and we have a 20 lb ham we know that if we pump the ham until it weighs 22 lb then we will have the exact amount of cure required. Notes Even if you inject, you will still need to hold the product overnight and cover it in a 50% solution to allow the cure to equalize in the meat. The best way to create a 50% strength solution is to measure the amount of solution you have left over and add that much weight in water to it. Or you could follow the initial mixing instructions and just add twice as much water as is recommended. Shop waltonsinc.com for Vertical Smokers Shop waltonsinc.com for American BBQ Systems Smokers

Cured Whole Muscle Meat 102 - Brining vs Injecting Attend this entry level class from Meatgistics University by watching the video, reading the article and post any questions you have! What Is Brining/Pickling? Brining and Pickling are terms that are often used interchangeably. Both terms refer to the practice of soaking a whole muscle cut of meat in a solution that contains salt, spices and a cure or curing agent. These methods rely on osmosis to get the solution to penetrate the cellular structure of the meat. What is Injecting? Injecting is the act of taking a water-soluble solution (one that will fully dissolve in water) and inject that directly into a food item that you plan on cooking. There are many different types of injectors used in meat processing, from small syringe-like injectors up to large-scale commercial equipment. You can inject cures, marinades or additives directly into your meat. Benefits of Brining This is the traditional, or old world way of curing meat. Some will argue that it imparts a superior flavor and that the cure is more evenly distributed throughout the meat. You can also use particles that are too large to flow through an injector when brining, the particle still will not go into the meat but some of the flavors will. Benefits of Injecting By injecting your solution directly into the meat you are greatly speeding up the process. A normal cure will penetrate at a rate of about 1 inch per day, so you while you might be waiting 5-7 days for a ham to be ready when brining you are ready to smoke or cook just hours after injecting. Other Methods Multi-Needle Injectors - These are machines that will inject a solution, sometimes a cure, through many needles deep into the muscle. These can be large commercials machines like the Promarks MSK-195 Brine Injector or a simple attachment to a Stainless Steel Injector Unit Vacuum Tumbling - A large-scale commercial operation will often inject a solution with a Multi-Needle Injector and then vacuum tumble it for a short period of time and then go directly to the smokehouse. This takes the cure time for a large ham from 5-7 days down to a few short hours. Shop waltonsinc.com for Vertical Smokers Shop waltonsinc.com for American BBQ Systems Smokers

Cured Whole Muscle Meat 101 - What Is It? Attend this entry level class from Meatgistics University by watching the video, reading the article and post any questions you have! What Is Cured Whole Muscle Meat? Cured whole muscle meats are any whole muscle cut of meat that you are going to cure and cook. Popular examples of this would be Bacon and Hams. Generally, these are larger thicker cuts of meat that we want to cook slowly so curing allows us to make sure the meat stays safe through the cooking process and we sometimes need to use different methods to effectively apply the cure. Curing Bacon When curing bacon you can inject the cure directly into the belly or rub the outside of the belly with a cure and allow osmosis to bring to the cure to the center of the meat. Since bellies are generally a thinner cut of meat either of these methods, as well as vacuum tumbling, works perfectly fine. Curing Ham When we start talking about thicker cuts of meat, like a ham, we need to either change the cure we are going to be using or change the method of introducing the cure. Dry rubbing a thick cut like this with a normal cure is going to cause problems as the cure might lose it’s effectiveness before it fully penetrates the meat, for this reason, we always prefer to inject large whole muscle meats with the cure solution and then follow that up with vacuum tumbling or brining in a 50% strength solution. Holding Period The meat must then be held to allow the cure to work in the meat. If you are using a traditional cure that contains Nitrites and no additives then you will hold it for 5-7 days after injecting, or if you are using a cure accelerator you need to hold it overnight or if you are vacuum tumbling you can go almost directly to the smokehouse. Cooking Since these cuts have been cured with Nitrates or Nitrites they can be slow smoked and since the cuts are so thick cooking times can be extreme. It is not uncommon for hams to take over 12 hours to be fully cooked. Storage Cured and fully cooked meats still need to be stored in the refrigerator, for the longest shelf life they should be vacuum packed first. Shop waltonsinc.com for Vertical Smokers Shop waltonsinc.com for American BBQ Systems Smokers