For many years I have been disappointed by typical commercially available ham, either cured water logged "half" hams or the water logged stuff we find for lunch meat in supermarket deli's. It/they simply don't have the taste or texture that I remembered from childhood. Specifically, now and then I'd find a cooked ham in my grandmother's refrigerator. I learned quickly that thin slices of that cold ham made truly delicious sandwiches with seriously good ham flavor and far better texture than any cold lunch meat purchased by my mother.

Along with the sandwich experience I fondly remember ham dinners served at church a few times a year. The slices were large, thick, and moist and tender and delicious. As the years passed, with me becoming an adult, I was interested (because I had money) in finding and enjoying great ham. But nothing quite seemed to measure up to my childhood memories, either in lunch meat or "half" hams. The meat was of presumably broader varieties, taste wise, in the deli. But the meat wasn't all that tasty, unless one wanted chemical flavors. The "half" hams became ever less appealing in taste and texture.

Finally, I noticed a significant yield reduction when purchasing what was advertised as shank or butt hams, but nowhere longer identified as half hams on the labels. The reason? The prime slices in the center of a whole ham had been removed, to be sold at much higher prices per pound, leaving the low yield dregs to the unwitting consumer. At that point I was plainly pissed off. The only ham occasionally worth eating was the popular and expensive spiral sliced hams, which were not as fluid logged. Still, they were a weak representation of what I remembered as a child in terms of taste and texture.

By coincidence I recently became interested in curing beef to make corned beef, and that experience was so positive I got curious about trying to make ham. I did some Internet research ... actually a lot of it ... to get a broad perspective on pork processing, different methods, different seasonings and aging considerations. I finally homed in on what looked to be easy, inexpensive and effective. Thus this extensive teaching recipe. In short, I was so successful and so pleased with my results I simply had to provide the information to a broad community of home chefs. And I want readers to understand why the stuff found in supermarkets has declined so badly in quality.

I decided to cure a four pound piece of partially defatted pork loin to make ham. I used Morton's® Sugar Cure®, which is (or at least was) used for making ham and bacon, etc. The spice pack that was supposed to be included with the Sugar Cure was missing so I went online and got a recommended spice mixture for making ham from uncured pork.

I learned that Mortons® no longer sells Sugar Cure®, but that turns out to be irrelevant, for other suppliers sell the equivalant of Sugar Cure®. Or at least that is what they claim. Make sure what you buy contains 0.5% sodium nitrate and 0.5% sodium nitrite along with salt, sugar, etc. Simply check it out on Amazon® and order what you want, inexpensively. Oh, I purchased ten pounds of dextrose (monoglyceride) online as the preferred sugar to use for curing meat (vs. sucrose[table sugar] which is a diglyceride of glucose and fructose). My idea, yet to be tried, is to use the dextrose in combination with Mortons® Tender Quick® curing mix to create a version of the Sugar Cure they no longer sell. That is my way of guaranteeing the right amount of curing ingredients and the best sugar for curing pork loin.

Special Note: I learned that Mortons® does have a recipe to use Tender Quick® instead of Sugar Cure® for making ham from raw pork. You simply use the Tender Quick standard amount per pound of meat and add one teaspoon of sugar to the cure mix per pound of meat. I, of course, will use dextrose to limit the sweetening effect.

I used almost 1/2 ounce (by weight) of the Sugar Cure per pound of pork. Morton's® recommended 2 1/2 pounds of Sugar Cure per 100 pounds of meat. That translates to 40 ounces per 100 pounds of meat, or 0.4 ounces per pound of meat, so I slightly exceeded the recommended amount of Sugar Cure. Not a big deal, but one should be careful of amounts when using sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite to cure meats. Use too much and you are either very sick or dead. In my case, the wetting of the pork loin surfaces with Wright's® Liquid Smoke® before applying the dry cure mixture partially dilutes the percentage of nitrate and nitrite available to the pork loin. I am satisfied relative to safety and flavor!

To the sugar cure I added one teaspoon each of ground cloves, ground allspice, black pepper and ground cardamom and mixed them well (but I started with some spices that were not ground ... Hey, no problem! See the directions later in the recipe for using a Magic Bullet® mixer to powder the curing agent and the spices.).

I spread a few teaspoons of Wright's® Liquid Smoke® over the raw pork before applying the mix of the cure and the spices because I did not intend to smoke the meat after it was cured and rested (the fancy name is "equilibrated" ... see below).

I put the cure and spice coated meat into a vacuum seal bag, vacuum sealed it, and put the bag into the refrigerator. It remained there for one week, being turned over once per day. In my first experiment I did a second curing cycle, which I later thought turned out to be mostly unnecessary and actually appeared to make the meat too salty and too highly seasoned, at least for salt sensitive people. The idea is that thinner cuts of meat in general require fewer cure cycles.

My next experiment is to use a single cure but lengthen the cure cycle from seven days to ten days. That would provide me a middle of the road flavor and level of saltiness, and sure enough it worked perfectly. The idea that matters is that you can experiment to please yourself.

After a single cure cycle, or sequential cures, the meat was rinsed and patted dry, then I vacuum sealed it and allowed it to "equilibrate" in the refrigerator for 10 days.

The meaning of equilibrate in this application is allowing the sodium content of the meat to reach even concentration throughout the meat, ergo, the inference is that immediately after a cure there is a sodium differential between the outside edge of the meat and the center of the meat.

Morton's recommends a 20 day equilibration period for a ham, but a ham is far larger and thicker than the pork loin I was curing. My section of pork loin flattened out to a variable thickness of maximum about 2 inches, thus the shorter 10 day equilibration period.

Some commercial hams are aged for six months or more after a full cure (three curing rounds instead of one or two). Sometimes they are processed in a smokehouse as part of the aging process. The aging and smoking processes intentionally cause the ham to lose moisture. I did not plan to age the cured pork loin or smoke it this time around. Maybe later I will try smoking and aging with thick cuts of pork. Then again, maybe not. I'm really not trying to make a salty country ham. My goal is to have somewhat moist, tender and very tasty ham slices perfect for sandwiches or as meat for dishes like linguine carbonara, or quickly fried ham for breakfast.

One other reason for waiting before trying aging is that the temperature and humidity environment for aging needs to be tightly controlled, and the meat examined regularly for development of surface mold. Any mold color other than white (especially black) calls for wiping down the surface of the meat with a cloth soaked in a mixture of water and vinegar, and then drying the surface of the meat. I was not interested in that process or the potential problems.

What I did instead of aging was to keep the equilibrated cured pork loin in the vacuum seal bag and I cooked the pork loin that way in a convection oven at 180 degrees F until the internal meat temperature rose to 150 degrees F. At that point it was fully cooked and ready to be used in multiple ways just like a fully cooked ham purchased in a supermarket ... only with far superior ham to that of the typical supermarket butt or shank portion of ham cured in brine or injected with brine. In short, I used a dry curing process, not a brine method ... or perhaps I should call it a hybrid method that includes liquid hickory smoke flavoring, a dry cure mix, plus vacuum sealing to force uniform and constant contact between the cure and the meat. In short, I used my ability to go beyond the less than great recipes I found on the Internet ... the ones that were sure to produce "dried out" meat!

If you think about it, my goal was to have moist but not water logged meat as I describe in my planned uses next. I intended to try some very thinly sliced pieces as lunch meat. I also planned to lightly fry a few pieces cut to about 1/8 inch thick. There, the idea is that pork isn't very good when it gets too dry during cooking, so avoiding aging and also doing the initial cooking inside the vacuum sealed bag maintains the original moisture content, though some of the moisture will exit the interior of the meat during cooking, sometimes along with some gelatin and some melted fat, even in a vacuum sealed environment.

This method was in total contrast to aging and smoking a whole ham, where the surface of the meat of the ham is covered by fat and skin, which will retain moisture during later brief baking to heat the ham. In my instance, the pork loin lacked both uniform surface fat and skin and so it could dry out with the meat exposed during any baking. Thus, no baking was done outside of the low temperature cooking in the vacuum sealed bag.

So much for my first attempts to do a sugar cure of pork loin to make ham. Wow, am I pleased! It was so very important to take the time to think through all the Internet recipes and recommendations and figure out what to keep and what to discard as stupid or at the least, outdated or unnecessary.

Now we get to the really good part of this narrative ... the Tasting!

To cut to the chase, what I made was virtually perfect. Lucky me! I was amazed that pork loin could be so perfectly moist and tender and delicious as a type of ham. I loved slicing the final product 1/8" thick in my meat slicer and using it directly for snacking and generously in making ham sandwiches. At first, I didn't even bother with frying any of it. And I didn't need to smoke it because of using Wright's® Liquid Smoke®.

My only caveat to all of this is that fat surrounding the areas of lean ham in a cured pork loin may or may not please you when you make a sandwich, or simply eat the meat as a snack. My preference was to simply peel or cut away most of the layer of fat from the perimeter and some from the interior of the meat and let a small amount there and enjoy it all. Yes, it was/is most enjoyable. I am highly pleased!

Note: In later batches I started removing the bulk of the fat from the pork loin before curing it. In one instance that caused a loss of 25% of the starting weight. My point is the fat loss can vary a lot, from 10% to 25% based on the ratio of meat to fat in any given pork loin. You might want to examine the available loins at the market and pick one with less fat, right?

Okay, I will now provide specific recipe information below so you too can make this delightful and inexpensive ham. More on the economics later, after the recipe. You will be amazed.

Ingredients:

1, 4+ lb. piece of partially defatted pork loin

2 ounces, by weight, of Mortons® Sugar Cure® (this ingredient is no longer sold by Morton®.)

Alternative cure using Mortons® Tender Quick: 1 boneless pork loin, 1 tablespoon of Morton® Tender Quick® mix per pound of loin, 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar (Use Dextrose) per pound of loin (note that the amount of tender quick is basically identical the the amount of sugar cure on a weight basis ... so this is totally easy)

1 teaspoon each of ground cardamom, ground pepper, ground cloves and ground allspice

3 or more teaspoons of Wright's® Liquid Smoke®

Directions:

Cut away any thick area of fat on the surface of the raw pork loin.

Mix together the Sugar Cure (or Tender Quick) with the spices. I use a Magic Bullet® mixer to basically powder all of it, so the fact that I started with whole cloves simply didn't matter. What I will note here is that the clove taste is noticeable, so you may opt to use half of what I used ... or not, for the clove overtone diminished in a few days.

Coat the raw pork loin with Wright's® Liquid Smoke® by hand. You may use 3 or more teaspoons of that product to moisten the meat surface.

Hand coat the meat with the cure and spice mixture. Do wash your hands afterwards ... unless you too would like to be "cured!" Of course, you might also wear latex or nitrile gloves and eliminate any skin exposure. Your choice.

Place the coated meat into a plastic bag and seal it tightly after expelling all the air, or, use a vacuum seal bag as I do and vacuum seal the meat, which guarantees there will not be any air in the bag.

Refrigerate the meat for one week to cure it and season it, turning the package over once a day.

After curing, remove the meat and rinse it and rub it to remove all curing agent and spices from the meat surface.

Pat the meat dry with paper towels, then put it into a plastic cook-in bag, or in a boil-in vacuum seal bag as I do, eliminate the air and seal the bag.

Equilibrate the meat for ten days in the refrigerator.

You are now at a decision point. You can follow the instructions below to cook the ham using a convection oven, or, you can read the Food Nirvana primer on Sous Vide Cooking in the Technology section and use that great technique for cooking the ham. It is your choice. Both methods will work well but the sous vide method is completely temperature controlled.

Put the bagged meat on a small rack on a baking sheet in the oven.

Set the oven to convection only at a temperature of 180 degrees F.

Check the meat temperature after three hours with an instant read thermometer, and periodically after that.

Once the internal meat temperature of the thickest part of the meat is 150 degrees F the baking is done.

Remove the bagged meat from the oven and let it cool to room temperature. There will be liquid surrounding the meat.

Put the bagged meat into the refrigerator to chill it overnight.

In the morning remove the ham from the bag, rinse it and pat it dry. Wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it until you are ready to use it. You might also vacuum seal the wrapped ham to provide a longer refrigerator shelf life ... or to give away the ham as a gift.

Use the great ham that day and later days (for up to a week, or even more) as you please. It is simply terrific! But do remember that once sliced a piece of ham should be eaten within a few days.

Now let's move on to the economics of making and using ham starting with raw pork loin, some curing agent and some spices.

I paid $1.99 per pound for the raw pork loin. When the entire process was done for multiple pork loins I had an yield of 80 percent from the starting weight of the ham (that includes final perimeter fat elimination ... and no added water weight!). Thus, my 4 pound piece of raw pork loin (64 ounces) yielded 51+ ounces of "real" ham, which translates to $8/(51/16), or $2.50 per pound for perfectly seasoned tender ham. The cost of the curing agent and the spices was almost nothing, for I buy both online with the spices at great prices from outfits like Nuts.com.

Now, given that the butt ham portion you buy in the supermarket at about $1.20/pound (on sale) is converted to edible meat, we are talking about a weight loss of roughly 60% in bone, fat, skin and added water (you gotta watch out for that game!). Thus, an eight pound butt ham produces only about 3.2 pounds of edible meat, for an expenditure of about $10, and that meat is of far lower quality in taste and texture compared to what you made at home with the pork loin.

In short, if you bought the butt ham portion in the supermarket you paid $3 per pound for inferior, tougher, water logged meat, compared to the $2.50 per pound for the great stuff you made at home.

At this point it should be clear that what you make at home is a far superior experience. Yet, what about the premium ham products at the supermarket that are mostly all tasty edible meat? All I can say is, check the price per pound and you will have the answer. Compare the taste and the texture too. I'm rather sure I know what you will favor. Note, however, that supermarket sale prices for items like spiral hams can provide you the opportunity to buy them at only $1.99/lb. And sometimes Master Cut hams (no bones, low fat) can be purchased for only $2.99/lb. at places like Costco®.

Yes, being independent by choice, with little effort, improves the quality and economics of/for your life.

Enjoy!