The charcuterie man is always dreaming about creating homemade jamon. In charcuterie art this classic Spanish product is considered to be the top masterpiece and the product my whole country is truly proud of.
Deep in his mind every chef realizes it’s really hard or even impossible in domestic conditions to compete with centuries of experience of Spanish manufacturers. However, it worths trying and I’m also the one who chose this yellow brick road route.
Initially I was not going to wait a year- year and half when the Iberian leg is hung and I had to make sure the whole deal was useless and the product was screwed up.
What I did: I cut out some pieces of the front leg with muscles of different colors and amount of fat, approximately by 2 kilos each.
And I did an appropriate salting and aging till optimal loss of weight, only within 3 months.
- Salt — 2%
- Cur #2 — 0,25%
- Sugar — 0,5%
- Black pepper — 0,5%
- Garlic — 0,5%
- Bay leaf — 1 leaf
Salting — 2 weeks. Later the product was rubbed a bit with red pepper and pepper Jalapeño so that the mold didn’t feel absolute freedom to grow and spread; and the product was sent to jail, sorry, to the chamber, precisely on the grid.
The «jamon» turned to be truly nice one. Of course, I had to cut it across the fibers on a slicer, however, the quality of the raw product, a perfect fresh Iberian pork helped a lot.
