Fully cooked ham

Maddie

Would it be advantageous to do a fully cooked ham on the egg? I have always done it in the oven, studded with cloves and basted with pineapple juice and brown sugar.

stike

sure.  you can add smoke, for example.

Squeezy

.... and you don't have to worry about internal temps.

Try using maple syrup instead of brown sugar for a change.

Maddie

This sounds good, I will give it a try. Thanks

stike

of course, you could always cure your own, and cold smoke it, then cook it with smoke again on easter.... heh heh heh


or heck, start one now for easter, and let it hang for a few months or a year

paulheels

Stike

What did you cold smoke with? Where you got those hanging?

stike

BGE, basement

paulheels

Cool. Not many basements in the south. I don't have one. What do you cold smoke In?

stike

you may have missed it... i cold smoke in the BGE.  i try to go 18 hours or so on the hams.  i use the small BGE as a firebox, and connect it out the top with a metal corrugated 3-inch dryer hose, into the lower vent of the large.

you can hang the country ham (that's a prosciutto behind it. got a bresaola going now, too) in any weather.  it is not necessary to control temps and humidity.  although you will be warned to stay 60-70 degrees and 50-60% relative humidity, none of those things have anything to do with food safety.  it is about predictable repeatable results. in truth, the best prosciutto and country hams are often stored in an unprotected barn, windows and doors open to the weather.  the makers boast of the seasonal variation not being a bad thing, but actually required in order to get the 'terroir' they are after.  whether it is any magic that the parm prosciutto gets " wafted by the cool night air" i dunno.  but it DOES tell me that there's no need to get hung up on controlling a system that hasn't been controlled in a few hundred years

we'll see how this goes.  could be a spectacular failure. but nothing is going wrong so far, about 5 months in.  prosciutto smells nice and clean like simple ham (or, well, prosciutto i guess), the country ham is deeply smokey

in the summer they drip a little fat, which is to be expected.  no, no flies, no bugs.  it doesn't happen.  that's why they cured them in the first place.  no mold, either, curiously.  mold on the bresaola though (it's a second one, not the one on the following pics from the priginal post. that one's been eaten)

here's more if you care and have bothered to read this long
LINK>>Prosciutto, Country Ham, and a Bresaola