Going the whole hog

Well half a hog actually.  We have been wanting to try curing and smoking our own ham and bacon for a really long time. We bought books about it, even read them, but that's as far as it went.  Then I came across an opportunity to buy free-range, heritage breed, almost organic pork in bulk, and before we could say "Charcuterie" we had about 30kgs of pork to deal with.

Thus began a steep learning curve. I started by unpacking the boxful of unidentified lumps of meat and sorting them into three piles.  One: Ham and Hocks.  Two: Chops.  So far, so good. Three: Unknown Other Bits.  Unfortunately pile three was the biggest pile.  Enter our savior - this book:

I found a diagram of a pig cut into it's various pieces and we set about trying to match our lumps to the cuts in the picture and therefore decide what to do with them.

Then it was onto to the curing.  The first thing to decide was whether or not to use pink salt (curing salt/sodium nitrite).  The info and debate out there about this additive is confusing.  Those for it say that it is essential to prevent the risk of potentially life-threatening botulism poisoning and to create a ham/bacon flavour and colour.  Those against say that it is potentially a carcinogen.

We ended up going without it, and took care to always keep the meat either above or below the risky temperatures.

The bacon was dry cured in a salt/sugar mixture and then hot smoked in our BBQ.  We used cuttings from our Mariposa Plum for the smoke.  We chopped small pieces, placed them in foil and sat them over one burner.  The meat was placed at the other side of the BBQ and the lid closed.  It stayed there for several hours until the meat reached about 75 degrees Celsius in the centre.

Here's the bacon (pork belly) curing:

 And here it is after hot smoking:

It is as yummy as it looks.

We also made some pulled pork - first seasoning it and hot smoking it, then roasting it a second time. It took all day really to cook and tasted wonderful, but maybe not good enough to bother with again.  Here it is seasoned and ready to go and then finished and being shredded:

The ham and hocks were cured in brine and then hot smoked.  The photo below shows one of the hams and a piece of pork belly.

So would I do it again? Yes and no.  

Half a pig at once was quite a lot of meat to deal with and to find room for in the fridge as it cured, particularly the big ham as it cured in a large tub of brine.  I have said before that prosciutto, ham and bacon are the reason I could never go to a fully vegetarian diet, even though at least half our meals are vegetarian.  Handling large amounts of raw pork though, was well... a bit gross.  Off-putting.  It took me about a week to recover before I felt like eating any of it.  I think doing just some pork belly and one ham at a time would be more manageable.

Then there was the constant checking of the smoking process, including the desperate dash to the servo for a new gas bottle when we realised it had run out just a half hour into the smoking.  Next time we would be confident we weren't going to poison anyone, but this time we fed it to the Hubster first, just in case, then waited a few days. We figured he was the one with life insurance.

The taste of the ham and bacon? Sublime.  And that's why we'll be coming back for some more home-smoked goodness in future :)