The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Three)

Part Three: Smoking.

The pancetta in the basement was joined by even more hanging meat. Smoke permeates the meat better if the surface is totally dry.

Jeff got to work preparing the wood. While it is true that you can buy wood chips all over the place, it seemed more fun to do that from scratch too. (Although not as much fun after an hour of sawing..)

This huge branch of Manitoba Maple fell down during one of last summer's windstorms.

Next morning, bright and early.

A few pieces of lit charcoal and a couple of chunks of maple got the smoke puffing nicely. Nice and cool.

Look at the happy smoker on the deck!

Look at the happy ham and happy hock and happy sausages!

Now look at the burnt, sad and unhappy ham!

This catastrophe occurred around hour 3 of smoking.

Everything had been going really well until that point. The wood was smoking consistently and was nice and cool for the first hour and a half, but then it started fizzling out. It took a while to get the next batch of charcoal and wood smoking nicely, so I figured I'd have to time it a little tighter on the next batch. Which led me, an hour later, to add half a dozen burning briquettes to the wood when the last half dozen were still going.

About fifteen minutes later, Jeff saw flames spitting out of the smoker. No more smooth, cool smoke. We had fire.

Now, the whole thing about smoking is that you want to flavour and somewhat dry out the meat without cooking it. This is why the low temperature is so important - you don't want to render any fat or cook the meat. Which is what happened.

I wept bitterly.

But all was not lost. The burnt parts of the ham were cut off, and then we roasted it. The smoke had permeated about 3/4 of an inch into the ham, leaving a nice pink ring on the outer layer. It tasted...kind of hammy.

Some of the bacon had started cooking in the fire and had gotten pretty leathery. I cut those pieces off to use later as salt pork, some of which flavoured a huge pot of spicy baked beans beautifully the next day.

There was about a 6-inch square of usable bacon from each slab that I had prepared. Hey, for my first try, that's not so bad, is it?

Mmmmm. Homemade maple bacon.