Slowly but surely we are getting the bulk of this Berkshire beast roasted, toasted, braised, brined, smoked, salted, sausaged and larded!  Pheww!  An amazing experiment and experience, but one that I'm also glad to see wind down.  Last Sunday we took a big step towards finishing up the 'Berkshire Experiment' as Big Dog and Barb came by with the cured hams ready for a trip through the smoker.

Due to scheduling and the size of the hams, we decided on a 12 day cure in our curing brine:

Big Dog soaked the hams in cold water for several hours before draining off, patting dry and putting back into the cooler to bring over to our place.  We decided not to season them prior to putting into the smoker so that we could get a pretty true representation of the Berkshire's taste in a brine cured ham.  The Big Green Eggs  were fired up and loaded with Great Charcoal   , then seasoned with pecan woodscuits from Smokinlicious!  (how's that for a sentence full of sponsor plugs!).  The temperature of the Eggs was targeted to run around the 250°F mark, with a projected time frame of 6-7 hrs max to bring the hams to 145°F internal, which was our target.

The Eggs just purred along, like they always do, for about 5.5 hours, until the internal meat temperatures were in the neighbourhood of 135°.  That's when I made up a quick and simple glaze consisting of 1 cup Jack Daniels, 2/3 cup brown sugar and 1/3 cup maple syrup.  Let that simmer on the stove til the sugar was dissolved and the glaze was bubbly and sticky-sweet looking.  Out to the Eggs to brush the hams with this 'Black Magic' glaze and suck up the fumes of that wonderful smoke and pork.  

Within an hour the first ham was done, with the second coming along about a half-hour behind.

My thoughts on the ham(s)? We were a little lax in getting some of the curing brine injected around the bone and there is a bit of area that is not fully saturated in cure as attested by the small areas of brown meat rather than pink.  Fortunately, this meat did not spoil and other than appearances, has been fine when eaten.  I'm sure Big Dog will say that it was not hit with enough smoke as he has become really enamoured with the flavour of bbq woodsmoke!  Not a bad thing; in fact, I too think these particular cuts could have taken a deeper smoke than they did.  Can't say much about the glaze, since the portion of ham that I took when we rationed the hams was the inner section that included the bone.  That's a good thing, since as I type this blog I can smell the bigass pot of ham bone diced ham, onion, carrot and blackeye peas gently simmering stovetop.  Nice and rustic comfort food for an early March morning.  Going to enjoy waking up to that later today!  Perhaps one of the other Les Noiracochon members can chime in as to the flavour and contribution of the Jack/maple/brown sugar glaze?

All that remains now of the Berkshire Project is to take the already-ground meat and make the English banger sausages and also to finish and sample the two varieties of pork confit that we currently have sitting under that snow white Berkshire hog lard in Big Dog's cold room.  Looking forward to trying those efforts!!