Waaay toooo salty...

Air dried cured Meat Techniques

Waaay toooo salty...

Postby si.hyde » Mon Nov 04, 2013 7:30 pm

Hi All,

I wonder if anybody can help with this...?

Earlier this year we dry cured a couple of legs of our very own home reared pork. It reached the minimum point of curing at the peek of our July sunshine and at the time we had nowhere to hang/cool the legs. So the hams stayed curing for a further 10 days or so, taking them to the later end of the scale.

So instead of them curing for 3 days per kilo, they cured for 4. Roughly speaking, as far as I can remember they cured for 48/50 ish days rather than 38/40.

Before hanging, we removed a piece off the bottom of one of the legs (there was to much of a risk of a moisture trap to our novice eyes so chopped this 'flap' of meat off) and hung it separately. It was a decent size piece.

We have just looked at this smaller piece and all is well - no black mold, once cut open it looked great. But it seems it has been greatly over salted. Unbearably so. And there is a small area in the middle of the ham that isn't pink in colour. More grey and less dried out.

My questions are,
1. Is there any way that we can deal with the two whole hams if they should be over salted to remove some salt at this stage? (we're 3 months in)

2. Is there any real way of testing the meat in the whole hams?

3. If I send a photo in of the smaller piece, could somebody confirm that the slightly less pink area in the middle of the smaller piece of ham is 'normal' and not bad. (I tried part of the 'grey' meat yesterday and as salty as it was, I'm still here typing and not been admitted to A and E!)

4. If I have to just leave them, is there anything by way of recipes that I can do with 20+kgs of cured. over-salted air dried ham (he says, crying into his keyboard!)


Thanking all ever so much in advance.

Si
si.hyde
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