Your Xmas Menu/Meat curing thread

Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

antdad said:
You gotta shoot it yourself of course...

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Who´s the guy behind you?
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

You mean you don't you recognise your mama?

You might find de-boning the hams preferable or at least one of them, less chance of going off. That's happened to me before.
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

antdad said:
You might find de-boning the hams preferable or at least one of them, less chance of going off. That's happened to me before.
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Good advice. I tunnel-boned one of them (can't resist a challenge, and I made stock out of the bone), and that's the favourite for decent air-dried ham. The other one I'm going to leave the bone in, but after curing I'll give it a molasses bath for two weeks before hanging as per a recipe in HFW's The River Cottage Cookbook.
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

hunnymonster said:
Mikael said:
Well, we had a lot :lol: everyone here (who celebrates christmas) eats smorgasboard.

Big ass ham is the most common rule (we had a 5 kilo ham this year). We also had: meatballs, pickled herring (5 kinds), spareribs, big paté, small frying sausage, different kinds of chease (Blue Stilton and wiskey cheddar this year), herring sallad (don´t ask), salmon cured in salt and sugar, potato and several different deserts and after that the chocolate and then cake ... :shock: I was so full up :lol:
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No Surströmming? I'm disappointed :lol:
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Nah, that´s in August :D Many folks here don´t like it though. My father used to eat surströmming the hard core way - just the filé, potato and milk (or sometimes bear). I like it, but it´s not the same now, when I can´t eat it together with my old man.

Tony: my mom says hi and sends her regards, she had fun that day in the woods, together with you :lol:
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

cheese_dave said:
antdad said:
You might find de-boning the hams preferable or at least one of them, less chance of going off. That's happened to me before.
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Good advice. I tunnel-boned one of them (can't resist a challenge, and I made stock out of the bone), and that's the favourite for decent air-dried ham. The other one I'm going to leave the bone in, but after curing I'll give it a molasses bath for two weeks before hanging as per a recipe in HFW's The River Cottage Cookbook.
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You need a proper tool for tunnel boning don't you?

It's a lot of effort that I'm sure your prepared to take but bare in mind you wouldn't normally cure the hams off such a young beast because they don't really yield the best flavour at that age. Having said that I'd still invest in a large syringe to inject some saline around the bone, I'm afraid I found HFW's recipes a little naive, fine in perfect conditions but have a good look around.
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

antdad said:
You need a proper tool for tunnel boning don't you?
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My proper tools were a YouTube video, persistance, enthusiasm and a very sharp Global boning knife. I took the thigh and hock bones out, took about half an hour, and a nice enough tunnel through the meat, which I salted thoroughly. There was more meat left on the bone than a master butcher might leave, but hey, this was my first time.

Totally take your point over the age of the meat, this piglet was likely just a few weeks old at its demise rather than a year or two, and that might be to its detriment.

I don't have a meat syringe for the ham with the bone still in it (can you get such a thing? - must Google), so I made sure and poked near the bone with a sharp knife and rubbed salt in like anything.

I'll be picking your brains about air-dried hams I'm sure, Tony...
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

It took me ages to find a picture of a tunnel boning tool, I was thinking of something like this.

whole_prosciutto_topside_with_special_kn.JPG


I've also sat in on a hip replacement operation and surgeons use something similar when separating flesh from a long bone like a femur.
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

Ah..good spot, also as I've now discovered known as a "ham gouge".

I'm sure some of the wood turners of the forum recognise it.
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

I guess you'd need a more specialised tool for a full-sized ham. This piglet's back legs are probably a quarter to a fifth the size of a full-sized pig's, maybe even more, so I was able to get away with a decent thin-bladed flexible knife.
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

A bit late with this but our dinner was home made lentil soup for starter, followed by top quality local butchers Sirloin steak with both roast and boiled potatoes (made the roasts myself with goose fat), some obligatory brussel sprouts and carrots. There were a couple of peeled small sweet onions in the pan when I made the gravy just to give it a little extra taste and these were quite popular with the steak. Pudding was a maple and pecan roulade.(bought). And a pasta veggie dish for my stepdaughter who is a vegetarian.

Minimal fuss and easy done, not bad for a man cooking, very enjoyable.

Some of the dishes here sound very nice, some good ideas for next year.
 
Re: Your'e Xmas Menu...

Forgot to mention... it was nearly an onion bhaji-free zone here on Christmas day... noticed (far too late) on Christmas Eve that we were out of gram flour... scoured the internet and discovered <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://jeenaskitchen.blogspot.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://jeenaskitchen.blogspot.com/</a><!-- m --> which had a recipe for baked onion bhajis using buckwheat flour instead (which, by happy coincidence we did have). Had to make a test batch on Christmas Eve and they were supernoshlicious. Just made a test batch of his gram flour-based baked bhajis and they're supernoshlicious too :hungrig
 
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