P to the I to the Double G-Y, I say PIGGY, word.

 

Nothing like a little farming rap to set your day off right.  We had a good day today.  For a fun little field trip, we ventured to the slaughterhouse to see another facet of that trip from 'farm to table' that so many foods take, that many people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes.   Sadly, a lot of people really believe that their food grows naturally in those prepackaged cellophane trays, and are so removed from the process that there is no respect for the animal, or the person who raised it.

Tiffany and Levi, thankfully, will grow up knowing every aspect of their food production, with home raised meats, vegetables, grains, sweeteners, and the like.  There are so many wonderful things that come from raising your children in an area where being locavores is a real option. 

The big thing we wanted to learn from this trip today was the anatomy of the hind quarters of pigs.  Now, why would we want to know that?  Well, there is more than one way to cure a ham.  The way that many people think of is the Country Dry Sugar Cure method, where a ham is rubbed with a salt/sugar mix, and allowed to dehydrate slowly over the course of 105 days.  They're then trimmed to remove the salt burnt face, and then smoked to add flavor.

Fewer than 10 percent of hams are cured that way.  It takes a long time, which makes them very expensive.  Think about it.  You have to have a facility to store those hams that are curing for 105 days, from day one, and if you slaughter pigs every day for 30 days, that means at one point, you're going to have over three thousand hams curing in your controlled temperature facility.   Smithfield, hats off to you.

So... what about those awesome spiral cut, juicy, honey glazed things in the store?  Glad you asked.  Those, my friends, are typically cured using a Sweet Pickle Cure.  EWWWW!!! PICKLES!?  PICKLED MEAT!?  Calm down.  We're not talking dill here, or really even Kosher, because duh, pork, right?

Pickle derives from the Dutch word pekel which means to brine.  Pickling is the act of preservation through anaerobic fermentation.  That's fancy talk for 'rotting under water' but it's a good sort of rot.   The brine allows the good bacteria to kill the bad bacteria, and essentially, you get a salty sweet food product.  Mmm... zombie flesh.

There are a couple of different methods of pickle curing.  One is the cover method which submerges the goods completely.  The ingredients are pretty mundane, and what you'd expect to find in any cure, except the copious amounts of water, naturally.  You have salt, brown sugar, garlic, pickling spice, pepper, and the miracle pink stuff, which is Prague Cure (a combination of Sodium Nitrate and Red Dye).

Mix it all together, add water, fill pot until full.  And then you just...wait.

Now, what's the downside to this?  Space, nonreactive pot, smell... It adds up, really.  But, it is one method, and it only takes 7 days.  That's much more economical time-wise than the Country Sugar Dry cure method.

Then... there's the pumping method.  . o O (Pumping method?)  Yes, I said pumping method.  This is how 90 percent of hams you buy are done.  The beauty of it is that the cure process is reduced to 3 days.  There are two different types of pumping.  There's spray pumping, in which a needle that has a half dozen holes in it is shoved in various points around the ham, and a brine is then injected into the ham.  Then there is ARTERIAL pumping.  This is where the cure is pumped through the femoral artery, which shoots down along the shank bone, and distributes the cure that way. 

Does that distribute the cure?  The X-rays speak for themselves.  The reduced time, increased flavor and increased weight (as dry cure hams lose up to 30 percent of their weight in the process), has made this method the most preferred amongst meat packers.

So, how does one go about artery pumping their ham?  Well, finding the artery may not seem as simple as one would think.  There's a lot of muscle and fat there, and if you don't know where to look, you'd never find it.

Once you saw your piggy in half, you will then remove the hide quarter, just infront of the pelvis.  This will give you your sirloin section, and your ham, all in one.  You'll then cut between the bones, which gives you your basic ham shape.

 

As you can see, the chunk up top, being held in place is your sirloin.  That would be cut into chops.  The bottom half is the ham.  What we're looking for is the femoral artery.  It's just like on humans, it starts in the groin and goes down the leg.  You put your injector needle in the artery and pump 20 percent of the ham's weight in cure down that sucker.

 

And that delivers the cure throughout our ham.  Total time from kill to cure is 3 days.  This will turn into that juicy, succulent, awesome ham that you have on Christmas day.  At least, that's the theory, and that's what we're trying.  We'll be sure to post pictures of our success or failure.  Wish us luck!