Those of you who were devotees of the Ebob Food and Wine thread might recall that I posted regularly about my experiments with charcuterie. I reported in from time to time on my efforts to make prosciutto with hams from a pig that was raised for me by a farmer in West Virginia, on the slaughter and processing of the pig (back in December 2008), and then on all of the steps involved in curing and aging the ham.
In fact, it is the loss of access to those threads, which included a lot of photos from me and from others, far more than the loss of access to other threads, that I’m pissed off about. So many people gave me such fabulous help along the way, it’s a pity to be shut off from that knowledge base. One of the things I posted, for instance, was a long list of all of the various recipies I’d found online for making prosciutto. Jay Selman read the thread and sent me a very hard to find horse-bone needle for testing prosciutto. Ah well. It’s gone.
But readers of that thread might recall that my first attempt at prosciutto making ended in failure. This is hardly surprising, considering the level of craft involved in making good aged prosciutto. But I also indicated that I was starting again with a ham from Pig2, raised from September 2008 - December 2009, and slaughtered (again, by us) on December 9, 2009. For that ham, I decided not to use the Ruhlman and Polcyn recipe in their book, Charcuterie, which I now believe to be quite off the mark.
Instead, I used Paul Bertolli’s approach from Cooking By Hand, which overlaps in many respects with the technique in the River Cottage Cookbook. In this technique, the ham is air dried in temps below 40 degrees and high humidity for up to six months, without any covering of a paste made from lard and rice flour. After this period, according to Bertolli, the ham is covered in the lard-rice flour paste and let to age for another 6-8 months in wine-cellar like conditions.
The ham from Pig2 hit the 6-month mark for the first stage of curing this weekend, so I took it out of the fridge, and began to prep it for the next stage of drying. As I trimmed off the dry exterior of the ham, however, I began to question whether any further aging would be helpful. The ham had the right color and consistency for prosciutto. And since this was not a ham of Jamon Iberico quality, it wasn’t clear to me what additional aging would add. I decided to slice up a small piece of the ham to taste for myself whether it was “done.” I decided that I think it might be done, after all.
I trimmed the rest of the ham into two large pieces - one boneless, the other including the leg bone - wrapped them both in wax paper and put them in the cellar. So they will continue to age, but I will not give them an additional six months under the lard-rice flour paste covering. For now, I am just damn pleased that more than two years since I began this experiment – the piglet that became Pig1 was born in spring 2008 – I can now say, at long last, that I have made a prosciutto. And not just any prosciutto – some damn good prosciutto to boot.