Prosciutto Therapy

The A-train is a very understanding sort of lady. She's remained mostly mum through my lengthy, expensive and sometimes dangerous obsession high performance cutlery. She has simply sighed and shook her head when she came home to find that I had bought a hand crank, cast iron grain mill and was busy grinding corn to make polenta from scratch. She's even come to accept that I will, 5 days a week or more, come home smelling like meat.

However, even I thought I might have overstepped her boundaries when I came home bearing two hoof-on hams from Fleisher's Meat right before Thanksgiving almost two years ago. The plan was to turn the two hog legs with the power of salt and time into sweet delicious prosciutto-style hams.

What, you may rightly ask, made me think that our ghetto-fabulous loft was the proper facility to produce a salty pork treat that is more than a year in the making? The short answer is, of course, poor brain chemistry and bad training. The long answer is Paul Bertolli, Hugh Fernley Whittingstall and JaneGrigson. These food luminaries each wrote a book that deluded and inspired me to attempt the heights of the Charcutiers' art in the depths of East Williamsburg.
I will admit that trying to cure hams in my apartment ventures dangerously close to rubber cement-sniffing territory. In my defense it really didn't sound that hard: trim up a fresh quality ham, bury in salt and wait. I can do that, right? I thought out all the science and it seemed plausible. What wasn't plausible was showing up with the above hams the Wednesday before A-train's holiest of holidays and in the midst of her baking of countless pies.

As a brief aside, I rarely agree with the city of New York's decision to ban handguns from the five boroughs. What can I say? I'm a real peckerwood that way. However, that night I was glad that we were in full compliance with the law because I can pretty much guarantee that otherwise A-train would have shot me right in the face and then beat me with raw pork.

Alright, enough bullshit. How exactly does one make one's own apartment-style dry cured ham? Easy. Sort of.

Phase One: Salt

You'll Need

1 15-20 lb. FRESH good quality ham (Berkshire or the like) with the hock on up to and including the gambrel

8 lbs. of fine sea salt or additive-free Kosher

1/4 cup pink salt (Instacure #1)

1 Wood wine box or Plastic bus tub storage container big enough for the ham

1 ham sized wood or plastic board or lid

1 20 lb. weight (a cinder block in a plastic bag is good)

1 rolling pin, t-ball bat or equivalent

You got all that? Solid gold. Now either ask your butcher or remove yourself the piece of pelvis bone still attached to the hip socket at the meat end of the ham. It's vaguely comma-shaped and you need simply to cut closely around it and free it from the socket. Don't panic, you can't really screw this up too bad.

Next step you just need to trim the skin, fat and meat around the end of the ham until it looks, you know, hammy. What you're trying to do here is just remove some skin and fat so the salt has more contact with the meat.

Ready for this? Now take your t-ball bat and give your ham about 20 good whacks all over on each side to the soft tissue areas. Don't hit the bones as this will tend to infect the meat and don't get crazy just some nice firm whacks. Done? Now take the bat and use it like a rolling pin on the ham moving from the foot end to the socket end to squeeze out whatever blood is left inside.

Now mix up a couple of pounds of salt with your pink salt and rub this mixture into all the nooks and grannies of the ham and bone. This prevents it from going yucky on you and also keep your meat inside pink.

Done? Now line the bottom of the box you got with 3-4 inches of salt. The more the better as this will be soaking up the water removed from the ham as the salt does it's thing. Place the ham in the salt and then cover it COMPLETELY with salt so that it has at least 1 inch of snowy white covering it.

Place your lid on top and place your weight on top of that and store in the coolest place in your house. I recommend doing this during the Winter and putting in that cold drafty corner by the leaky window. Leave in this place for 25 days. Don't forget about it! After 25 days check on the ham and make sure it is firm all over. If it is not replace in the salt and leave in another 5 or so days.

Phase Two: Making Time

For this you will need an airy place like a fire escape, some cheesecloth or other light breathable cloth like a worn out cheap pillowcase and some hefty string.

First things first: before you hang it you must wash it. Wash or wipe the clinging salt off the ham and then rub it down with high acid white wine or white wine vinegar. Be thorough! This is to keep out the bad stuff.

It should look like this:

Now cover in cloth, tie up the top through the gambrel (that's the hamstring which will already be punctured by the slaughter house) with your string and hang somewhere with good ventilation and where rats or a similar beasty can't get to it. The A-train made me build a Metro-Shelf in our drafty corner to hold it and to keep it away from eye contact with her and most house guests.

What now? Wait. A long time.

How long? depends on your ham and how you want it to turn out. If you want it soft and sweet like a Parma ham you can age it 6-9 months or until it is firm but yielding to a gentle squeeze. If you want more of a Jamon Serrano you will want to hang it for a year or more until it is hard.

Variations on the curing process are covering the cut meaty face of the ham with warm lard that has been blended with rice flour and either crushed black pepper or fresh resinous herbs like thyme or rosemary.

Eventually A-train stopped worrying and learned to (sort of) love the Ham. It turned from a source of embarrassment to a point of weird pride when we had house parties and BBQs. I imagine that people, trying to remember our New Years 2006-2007, said things like " you mean the place with the animal leg by the window?" I however grew steadily more and more dubious about the ham in the corner. I suspected that it was vastly over-salted. It looked like a pig fossil. Everyday that passed I became more and more sure that it was going to taste like a tobacco flavored salt lick that would then cause it's eater to explode in a dazzle of cinders and ash like a vampire in Blade III. By the time Feaster 4 came around this April I had frankly given up. I took it to work to soak it in water for a week before smoking it for an Easter ham. It was then that I first carved through the dark ashy brown exterior and into the deep pink-red of the meat. I brought the first slice to my lips expecting the Blade III treatment and was totally surprised that it tasted like the best cured ham I had ever eaten!!

I was so impressed I carted around to my friends after work to have them taste it, just in case I had suffered some sort of delusional salt poisoning and they too thought it was very good. While the results ended up well the ham was half eaten by the time Easter rolled around but it didn't stop the attendees from previous shin-digs from, tentatively at first, eating the the ham down to the bone.

It might seem hard to believe that I hadn't learned my lesson after the pork debacle of 2006 but I eventually managed to come up with some even more gross and hair brained ideas but that's a post for another day.