The BEST Way to Cure and Smoke a HAM (The Forgotten Art)

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is a thing the old farms did with a hog that has near vanished from the world, and it is one of the finest and most useful skills a person could ever learn. Today I am going to show you how to cure and smoke a ham. Most folks have never given a thought to where a ham comes from. They buy it in a plastic wrapper, already pink and cured and smoked, and have no notion that it began as a plain fresh leg of pork, no different from any other cut, and that it was turned into a ham by two of the oldest arts there are, curing and smoking. And here is why those arts mattered. Before there was any cold box or freezer, a farm that butchered a hog in the fall had to make that meat last through the whole long winter, with no way to keep it cold. The way they did it, the way that fed families for hundreds of years, was to cure it in salt and smoke it over a slow fire. That is what a ham truly is. It is pork preserved to last, and made delicious in the preserving. Now I must be honest with you, for there are two ways to go about this and they differ in a way that matters for your safety. The true cured ham, the pink keeping ham, uses a curing salt that not only gives the rosy color but protects the meat through the long slow cure. It is potent and must be measured exactly and kept away from children. The simpler way skips it, but then you are making a fresh brined and smoked pork, to be cooked through and eaten fresh, not stored. Both are good. Only be honest with yourself about which you are making. WHAT YOU NEED For the brine: Water and apple cider Coarse salt (a good deal) Brown sugar and a pour of molasses Whole cloves, peppercorns, pickling spice, bay leaves Optional: onion, garlic, orange or lemon peel For a true cured ham: pink curing salt, measured exactly for the weight of meat The meat and smoke: 1 fresh (uncured, unsmoked) ham, also called a green ham Good hardwood for smoke: apple, cherry, hickory, oak, or pecan Here is what you will learn: ✔ What a ham truly is, and why farms cured and smoked their meat ✔ The honest difference between a true cured ham and a fresh smoked one ✔ How to make the curing brine, with cider and molasses ✔ Why the brine must be stone cold before the meat goes in ✔ Why you must ask specifically for a fresh, uncured ham ✔ How long to cure, and why patience is the whole method ✔ How to form the pellicle so the smoke clings ✔ Why apple and cherry wood suit pork so well ✔ How to know the ham is safely cooked through ✔ The apple cider glaze for a sweet, sticky finish You do not need a factory and you do not need to buy your ham done. You need a fresh leg of pork, salt, smoke, and a great deal of patience. And once you carve into a ham you cured and smoked with your own hands, you will understand what the old farms always knew, that to preserve your own meat is a kind of security no store can sell you. It was never a mystery. It was salt, and smoke, and patience, the same three things that fed families through the winters of a hundred years and more. Now tell me something down in the comments. Did anyone in your family cure or smoke their own meat, keep a smoke house, put up hams and bacon in the fall, and do you remember it? It is a vanishing knowledge and I would dearly love to gather what folks still recall. Tell me. Next time I am going to show you something small and humble and wonderful, made from nothing but flour and egg, homemade egg noodles, rolled out and cut by hand, tender golden noodles far better than any dry ones from a box, and just the thing to go alongside a good ham. Next time, the homemade noodle. Until then, take good care of the ones at your table. And keep a kitchen that knows how a plain leg of pork becomes a ham, by nothing more than salt, and smoke, and patience. #curedham #smokedham #howtocureham #smokedmeat #curingmeat #ham #porkbutchering #homestead #selfreliance #preservingmeat #fromscratch #smokehouse #oldfashioned #foodpreservation #pennsylvaniadutch