Pauline's Christmas Ham

[saucisson]

Very interesting Wallie. Thanks,

Dave

[jasonmolinari]

Hey guys, i'm reviving this old thread as i found it doing research for a prosciutto cotto i'm looking to make....and it being brined requires research.

Couple of point....
1) I have no idea if method 2 is applicable to large pieces of meat, but i can probably explain why there would be 2 methods. Speed. Commercial processors may not want to wait the 4-6 weeks it takes to equilibrate large pieces, so the FDA offers the option to pump the meat and reach it in a week. Just a thought...that's neither here nor there

2) Looks like QWF never posted his results on measuring weights before and after, nor did Phil post about whether he got his samples tested, nor NCPaul about his own ham experiment. Were these put in other threads i haven't found just yet?

Right now i'm tending towards a pump and brine approach using weight pickup as a direct correllation of salt pickup and well as nitrite pickup. It may not be entirely accurate, but since this is not a dry cured product and eaten fairly quickly i don't see the salt/nitrite levels to be super critical like they are for dry cured products which are aged months. Keeping the nitrite level at the lower end of calculations for safety will results in, at worst, a not-fully-cured hunk of pork...which will be evident by the difference in color, and a slightly shorter shelf life.

thanks!

[saucisson]

Dave potters off round forum looking for NCPauls writeup....

[saucisson]

Ah, from February...

Failure. I was trying to follow the absorption of sodium nitrite using the method I cited above. Unfortunately, for some very technical reasons, I would have had to done the cure in a 70/30 mixture of water and methanol, possibly with an octylammonium phosphate buffer as well. That is quite far from "normal" curing so whatever data I may have come up with would have been of limited value. I was keen to follow the nitrite since I'm not sure how it reaches equilibrium if it is constantly being converted to NO and reacting with the meat. Maybe I can get my younger brother interested in this problem; he has better equipment and is better at this type of testing. Don't tell him that.

[wheels]

Jason

No, I didn't get them tested. One reason was the cost, the second was that the test would have only been for the salt. Nitrite testing would have cost an awful lot more.

Having done some more brine equilibrium curing, I found that the meat was more salty at the same % calculation than the injected. Given that, if the injected behaved as some thought it ought to and picked up a lot more salt/nitrite during the brining period, the product should have been a lot more salty than the equilibrium one, I concluded that there was nothing to worry about.

I'll explain:

I made an injection cure that at 10% gives:

149PPM Nitrite
1.93% salt

I put this in the brine for 7 days which, according to method 2, for the weight I was using should add an additional:

680PPM Nitrite
3.98% Salt

In total then, the ham should be:

829PPM Nitrite
5.91% salt

The ham was not soaked in water before cooking.

This ham should have had more than double the salt of the last brine equilibrium cure that I did. But in reality it has less. In side-by-side taste tests this is clearly apparent; the injected one which should have been over 5% salt is less salty than the one that was only brined which had around 2.5% salt - there's no doubt about it.

This leads me to believe that the ham has perfectly safe levels of nitrite as I can only assume, (as NCPaul did - and he's far better qualified than I am to comment) that the nitrite will behave in the same way as the salt.

Captain Wassname continues to explore this whole area (as do I) but we are hindered by not having the scientific equipment to test products, or cheap access to testing.

HTH

Phil