Cooked hams and corned meat
There are many ways to cure meat, I find the best way to cure meat you are going to cook afterward is in a wet brine. Hams, gammon, corned beef, bacon, tongues, hocks.
It gives you a chance to spice and flavour the meat, allows you to keep it longer (not that any of use really need to preserve meat anymore unless you are working with whole beasts). But the main thing it allows you to do it cook it to a higher temperature while keeping it moist.
Cooking to a higher temperature allows you to break down he connective tissue between the cells in the muscles making them more tender, curing lets you reach these temperatures without breaking up the cells themselves.
The reason for this is the use of salt and sugar. Both of these ingredient have the ability to extract water from inside a cell without breaking the cell walls.
Imagine a cell is like a balloon filled with water. If you heat the ballon the water inside will expand building up pressure and burst the balloon. (This is a simplified explanation of why well done meat is dry).
Salt and sugar can absorb the liquid through the cell wall without bursting it which is called osmosis. By reducing the amount of liquid inside the cell it mean there is less pressure build up inside the cell, thus it can reach a higher temperature before it ruptures which would cause the meat to become dry.
Cooking to a higher temperate allows the tissue which connects the cells to break down. Between 65 and 85 degrees C the meat would normally be well done. An example for a pork chop grilled without being brined on the bbq we would cook it to 52 degrees to serve, everything after 55 gets dry. To bake the same cut of meat as a cured ham you will aim for 65, at that temperature the bbqed pork chop would have been thrown out as unserviceable.
Some cuts like short ribs need to reach a higher temperature, closer to 85 degrees, which is why shorter brines are used. It allows meat to keep its juices in and stay firm while having a soft texture. The short brine doesn’t give the flavour of cured meats.
Salt and sugar are used to preserve due to the same mechanism, the salt draws moisture out of the bacteria cells it come into contact with dehydrating them, which is why hams and salami are safe to eat. The bacteria is unable to multiply while the meat dehydrates causing even more moisture loss until the bacteria is completely inactive.
There will be many recipes which require a brine technique on this blog as the years go by and many will have variations from the following recipe, the philosophy is the same. To allow salt to reduce the bacteria in the ingredients and to raise the cooking temperature of the item being cooked.
Here is a basic brine recipe which is good got have on hand.
It is useful for preserving bacons, hams, tongues or hocks for long periods, or for shorter brining recipes like chickens, short ribs, cheeks, or a leg of lamb for a roast or braise.
Basic Brine
6ltr water
500g salt
300g sugar
135g brown sugar
180g honey
10 cloves garlic
3 onions
2 sticks celery
1g nitrate (if using)
4 bay leaves
10g black pepper
3 allspice berries
10g coriander seeds
4 cloves
5g mustard seeds
Bring all ingredients together in a large pot and bring to the boil.
Boil for 10 minutes then turn off the heat. Allow to cool slowly to room temperature.
Transfer to the fridge or a cool space in a sealed container.
Theoretically this will last forever in a sealed container. It will become less aromatic and not visually appealing after 2 weeks vegetable wise so passing out the solids after that time is a good idea.
A couple of jars of brine in your pantry will make preparing hams, or brining a chicken or turkey a thoughtless task rather than a whole procedure.
The brine is single use. Once you have brined meat in it needs to be discarded. As it can raise the potential of some cross contamination risks aswell as not knowing the salt percent left in the brine can become low enough to house pathogens.
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