How To Make Homemade Smoked Ham - Recipe
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I bought all the ingredients in the recipe above minus the sure gel. Will this recipe give me the “grocery store” flavor? I mean like buying a commercial ham flavor? The same with bacon I bought the dry rub bacon and bacon booster. All I am looking for is store bought flavors, nothing different than what I am used to. I will be getting a hog to slaughter in the fall and this will be my first attempt doing the entire process by myself. I even bought some liquid smoke just to make sure that smoke flavor is all the way through the meat. Do you know what the 1 quart liquid smoke is from? Hickory? Apple? or just a combination of woods? Just curious. Thanks!
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cu_hunting Both the Dry Rub Bacon and the Country Brown Sugar Cure are both designed to be “mainstream” seasonings, neither of those will be anything off the beaten path. Those are both the right choices for first attempts also, good job on choosing ones that will make it easy on you. Don’t go crazy with things until you’ve done a few and have gotten comfortable with it! Smoke is hickory.
Good luck and let us know how it goes!
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How much liquid smoke do you think I should use? I remember brining and injecting a whole turkey and If I remember right about a couple tablespoons to about 2 gallons of water is what I used… Thanks much! I will post pictures of the finished products!
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cu_hunting Oh yeah, it is a tiny amount 3 oz of the Liquid Smoke we sell is enough for a 100 lb of meat, so that would be about right, potent stuff!
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The California ham spice isn’t going to throw off the “normal” flavor of a ham will it? or the bacon booster? I bought everything that you guys recommended in your video’s… Just want the “store bought” taste if you know what I mean… Sorry for all the dumb questions. Thanks again!
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cu_hunting Nope, not dumb questions, at least not in my mind. Now, a store-bought ham or bacon might be better than your first few tries, depending on what you like. Hams can be difficult to get really good at but once you get it a homemade product should be similar/superior. For bacon, once you make one or two yours should be superior to what you can buy in the store.
Add ham spice for sure, without it you won’t get much of a “ham” taste, they are using something similar in the hams you are getting from a store. For the bacon the Bacon Taste Booster is designed to add old world bacon taste when using modern curing techniques like injecting and tumbling, so that won’t throw it off either.
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I’ve made ham twice now, it’s been small wild hog hams. The first was boneless. I injected it per the recipe. It turned out a bit salty, but otherwise excellent. The last one I did was bone-in, and weighed 4 pounds. I didn’t have sure gel and used carrot fiber instead. I injected and cooked as before. However in this finished ham there were obvious pockets of cure that were a bit unappetizing. Again, otherwise the flavor was great. I have two questions, first do you think the carrot fiber sub was an issue? I noticed that the injection mixture was pretty thick going in. Secondly, do you think soaking would be more effective than injection on such a small ham? And as far as cooking schedule on such a small ham, I shortened each temp/time period by about half, is that the right move? Thanks!
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I’ve made ham twice now, it’s been small wild hog hams. The first was boneless. I injected it per the recipe. It turned out a bit salty, but otherwise excellent. The last one I did was bone-in, and weighed 4 pounds. I didn’t have sure gel and used carrot fiber instead. I injected and cooked as before. However in this finished ham there were obvious pockets of cure that were a bit unappetizing. Again, otherwise the flavor was great. I have two questions, first do you think the carrot fiber sub was an issue? I noticed that the injection mixture was pretty thick going in. Secondly, do you think soaking would be more effective than injection on such a small ham? And as far as cooking schedule on such a small ham, I shortened each temp/time period by about half, is that the right move? Thanks!
bcompton53
I forgot to add that in the first ham, due to the aforementioned confusion in the recipe, I injected and also let sit in brine for 4 days. The last ham was just soaked overnight. In both cases I left out the sodium Erythorbate. -
bcompton53 I would imagine that the Carrot Fiber played a part in your cure not equalizing. They do sell an injectable carrot fiber but its only available for special order from Excalibur. Since it gets so thick I imagine your cure was mostly bound up in the carrot fiber and it couldn’t travel everywhere. With a 4 lb you can inject or brine it, the only thing that would concern me would be green bone even with such a small ham, it’s unlikely though so you should be ok.
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bcompton53 I would imagine that the Carrot Fiber played a part in your cure not equalizing. They do sell an injectable carrot fiber but its only available for special order from Excalibur. Since it gets so thick I imagine your cure was mostly bound up in the carrot fiber and it couldn’t travel everywhere. With a 4 lb you can inject or brine it, the only thing that would concern me would be green bone even with such a small ham, it’s unlikely though so you should be ok.
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To reduce saltiness can/should the ham be placed in cold fresh water for a couple hours after the cover brine before smoking? Not sure if it will have the same saltiness reducing effect as say on a dry cured bacon?
HTCMTF I was wondering the same thing, about whether the brine should be rinsed prior to smoking similar to the dry bacon rub. Did you do this? If so what were the results like? Im about to make hams and bacon from 4 pigs we slaughtered.
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Ryan Stephens Add all seasonings at once. Create more of your brine that you need to inject and then use the remainder of the brine that was not injected as the base for your 50% cover brine. TO do this just weigh the amount of solution you have left and then add that weight in water. So if you had 1 gallon of brine left add 1/2 gallon of fresh water. If that is not enough to cover your ham you can add another 1/4 of the weight (in this case that would be 1/4 gallon) to the brine before you would have to add anymore cure.
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Ryan Stephens I ended up soaking it over night, (12 hours ish). Came out great. My wife is the one with the salt sensitivity issue. She said it was noticeably less compared to simply rinsing. Could be all in her head, lol. Same recipe both times. Good luck!
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Also, personally I like this video 100s of times better as I talk more like a human being than a weird robot! https://meatgistics.waltonsinc.com/topic/801/cured-whole-muscle-meat-105-ham-basics
Get more help with your processing questions and learn more about processing meat by subscribing to our waltonsinc.com youtube page at https://wltns.link/waltonstv I am a Gorilla, love yourself
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Also, personally I like this video 100s of times better as I talk more like a human being than a weird robot! https://meatgistics.waltonsinc.com/topic/801/cured-whole-muscle-meat-105-ham-basics
Jonathon
Hams turned out amazing!!! Nice and juicy!
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Ryan Stephens Sure looks awesome!
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napacorey Are you looking for vacuum level and time? If so set speed tp 50, pull a 20" vacuum and go for 3 hours. That still requires an injection by the way.
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