I ham a failure

There are actually wonderful things about living through a Minnesota winter, not many, but there are a few.
First, winter here gives you a relief from the oppressive humidity with skin cracking dryness. Second, it kills the swarms of mosquitoes for a few months. Third, you are able to expand your storage of refrigerated and freezing items to your front porch or steps when you need to more room.  Winter is a great time to try grilling new items or brining something that you need to store for a long time and you do not want to take all the room in your refrigerator.  Which is why I wonder why I took so long to do a long brine and grill of a fresh ham and put it off until spring arrived.  I am sure I have lots of excuses, but for now I will add this to the list of things I shall change when I make my next attempt at making my own ham using the wet cure method.

My goal was to create a flavorful ham starting with a fresh ham.  I have roasted a ham before using a method from Cook's Illustrated Best Recipes book, the maple glaze was excellent and I was lucky enough to remember to do this during a winter so I could brine this sucker during the winter months.  This time was going to be different, as I wanted to try something that would get me a longer brine which should penetrate the meat more deeply, plus I really wanted to have the smoky flavor from the grill, plus having the added bonus of sitting outside with a beer while I made sure the process was going correctly.

I did quite a bit of digging on many sites dedicated and came to conclusion that I would either need to build a large smoke house for the dry method or simply guess as so many people had wide view of opinions of the best way to to brine a fresh ham.  It ranged from 8 hours to 17 days.  I am not sure I could sell the rest of my household on building a smoke house while my to do list gets long so I went with the wet cure method.  I figured I would shoot for about ten days of brining towards to the middle of the range.

The next was to figure out the best brine to use.  For most items I grill I have found I put together what I like for the brine and it seems to work out great after a few trials and errors.  One of my other considerations was to consider how to preserve the meat carefully.  I, like many others I know have concerns about adding too many preservatives.  I have talked with natural butchers and they have experimented with things like cherry wood extract and celery salt, but it never sounded like they really were confident.  I went with ignorance and tried to lighten the salt load from recommendations as an aim to reduce the over saltness of some commercial hams I have tasted.

So, I ordered a ham from my friends at the local market and started my brine the day before.  The idea is that it takes time to allow the brine to cool after getting heated up.  In the past, I could either rely on a subzero winter day to quickly cool off the brine or I could make an concentrated brine, by using half the amount of water I needed and just add ice cubes to cool it down.  I just figured it was just as easy to make it the day before and cool it on the stove and then put in the fridge until the ham arrived.  I used a typical salt/sweet mixture plus extra spices. I would typical give you some details, but I am not aiming to give you bad information today.

For example, I was worried about making the ham too garlicky.  So I opted not to boil the garlic cloves in the brine, instead added them after everything had cooled.  Wouldn't do that again as you will see at the end.

I picked up the ham, it was 18 pounds, bone in.  I prepped the ham with cross cuts across the fat on the back to allow better penetration of the brine.

On to the wait, the ham rests in large container.  I rotated the ham daily, which is supposed to help with absorbing of flavor.  Not sure I believe that but it kept me out of trouble a few minutes a day.









So, after ten days, it was time to start the grill and get this going.

Using a electric starter.

 I have a Big Green Egg grill at home, which works great for grilling and smoking.  I filled up the fire box section for an expected 10 hours of grilling.  After the fire was going, I set it up using the Green Egg indirect plate to keep the direct flame away from over cooking the meat closest to the flame.

 Right at 9:00 am I had the fire going and I added apple wood chunks to get a nice flavor smoke started.

 It started great and I was looking forward to the process.  In this picture you can see I wrapped the thinner end of the ham to prevent over cooking.

You can see the first peek at 10:30 ish time.  I did a quick temperature check and it was at 65 degrees at this point.     

 At this point it is about noon and it is nice to see the browning appear, though the temperature is at 97 degrees.

 At 1:00 pm, you can see some the meat pulling away from the bone, temperature is at 115

 2:30 pm  temperature 143

 Moving towards the end 3:30 pm.  Temperature was 151, darn rain showed up!

 I hit my goal of getting it to between 155- 162, with a tempt of 159 at 4:00 a little earlier than I expected. I made a bourbon, orange juice, glaze, just to pretty it up a bit.

 I pulled it off nicely.  I use some insulated rubber gloves that make the process much easier and let it rest.

I open it up and it was nicely moist.












The results:  Well, I was not overly happy with the taste.  It came out as a wonderful, flavor of a roast pork.  Not bad, but not what I was shooting for.  The concerns over garlic intensity, were mistaken.  It has a slight garlic taste, but not what I was expecting.  My next attempt will be to try an injection method to get the flavor into the ham.  But I have 18 pounds of wonderful roasted pork to get through first, plus winter is always only a few weeks away in Minnesota, so once that rolls in, I should be all set.