Somewhere in the Loire Aging cheese in a pot in an outbuilding is one thing, but making your own smoked ham seems a little more arduous to me. This story will help me gather the dots and maybe I'll feel confident enough one day to go through the whole preparation myself and have these precious things hanging in the corner of the room... This isn't the kitchen workshop of a sleek restaurant with a chef teaching his culinary skills with hype to a group of urban fooding aficionados. This is about real people making their own artisanal food in the countryside like they've been used to for generations. Our ancestors used to do this sort of thing every year, maybe twice a year : they would kill a pig and prepare tons of things from it which they would eat during the following months. Making smoked ham was not purely for the sake of good taste, smoking the meat was a way to conserve it and stretch its consumption along several months at a time when fridges and freezers were unheard of. This tradition is still surviving somehow, and if some well-connected people in the countryside still get the pig directly from a farm and have it killed in order to prepare their lot of boudin, patés, rillettes and jambon, many other wait the regular sales of certain supermarkets where large chunks of pork or even half pigs can be got for as low as 1 or 2 € a kilo, and they then prepare their charcuterie the traditional way. For example, the large hams with bones on the refrigerated display case on the left weighed a bit more than 6 kilograms each and were sold at 2,5 € a kilo, and the buyers will certainly prepare them at home. The hams featured in this story aren't these particular ones but they were ordered through the meat department of a local supermarket at discount prices.
Hams marinating in white wine
Since I came to know Jacky in the Loire, I've seen him preparing his hams every winter when I visited at this time of the year, but I never saw really the whole process because it's stretched over a long period of time but the glimpse that I had the chance to see now and then made me always amazed at this ability to prepare all sort of meat products. Making your own smoked ham is some sort of luxury for us urbanites. Even if many in the countryside now buy the meat in supermarkets for better prices, the transformation at home makes it already an artisanal product, and they know how their hams, pâtés and boudin have been made : they took the necessary time, chose the ingredients, in that instance for this smoked ham, they used real smoke and real wood and leaves for the fire, in a real fireplace, and added no preservatives. Making an artisan product this affordable is indeed a luxury, and on the other hand when you look at it twice, that's quite simple and it just asks for determination and method. Let's rewind before we get to this stage on the picture above : From the initial ham with bones like the one in the refrigerated shelf, Jacky makes three smaller blocks named noix de jambon, which will be easier to process with their smaller size. That's the different meat parts that you will see on the pictures. He will then rub the hams with marc or goutte (fruit or grape alcohol) and leave them ointed in the bowls for three days with the half-centimeter deep of alcohol that fell in the bottom of the bowl when he did this. Then he'll take 25 grams of unbleached sea salt per pound of meat (yes, they count in pounds down here...) and will rub the meat with it so that the salt gets in every part of the hams. All the while, note that he left the alcohol (a very little amount actually) in the bowl. The meat stays so three days also
Three hams just out of the marinade
After the marc and the salt stage comes the saumure, or brine, stage that you can see on the second picture above : the hams are being left floating to the top in white wine complemented with all sort of vegetables, carrots, onions, parsil, bay leaves, thyme, cloves and so on. Jacky says that the wine doesn't need to be particularly qualitative and the cheapest makes a good job, which I understand as meaning that a cheap acidic white may be better. Of course the same plastic bowl was used, meaning that the salt and the remaining marc was integrated into this brine. The hams will be kept floating two or three weeks there, considering that you turn them over from time to time so that they're evenly marinated in the saumure. All this can be done in a cool room, like in an outbuilding. Jacky uses an uninhabitated house at the other end of his property for this preparation. When time is up, the hams are being taken out of the juice and dried on a towel.
Home-made press
Immediately thereafter, that's the press stage : the hams are wrapped with a towel around them and they will be pressed in order to be ready for the smoking stage. The press used by Jacky is a home-made one and consists of two thick wood boards being held tight with nuts and screws at the 4 corners. This allows him to press different sizes of hams, including several ones together when they're not too big. I remember spotting aluminium presses on the flea markets and in the vide-greniers [picture on right - not my picture] and I guess that they were designed for that purpose too. I almost bought one such press as it was so cheap, it's a beautiful object and I was beginning to consider trying to make ham once (still didn't make the step yet). But the shape of these aluminium boxes is not flexible on the sides so you must have the right size for your meat. The fact that these aluminium presses go for sale and are discarded by their owners proves that many people have been making their own ham like Jacky but stopped at some point, maybe because of old age, or they found more convenient to buy the finished product in the supermarket. The hams are pressed progressively [pic o left], meaning that after a few hours it's possible to screw a bit tighter, the whole press stage taking a couple of days. The purpose is to get rid of the juice that got into the ham. Jacky has only one such home-made press, so as he makes quite a number of hams, he rotates the stages to process all the meat he wants to smoke.
Tying up the meat with strings
When time comes up to tie the hams with a string, Jacky calls his friend Gérard who has some expertise in the matter, as well as for many other meat preparations by the way (you may remember Gérard extraordinary performance on preparing blood sausage for a village event). Gérard came to help with his grand son Hugo, who may inavertedly find inspiration for his future career here, who knows ? The hams don't go straight from the press to this string thing. They are left quiet for a couple of days in the fridge where they take back a rounder shape. Here, you see many more hams as Jacky made successive batches of hams that he could handle with his lone press. When they were all ready, he called Gérard. the tight wrapping of the string is intended to allow an easy slicing of the ham with the knife, when time has come to eat the jambon. Like many things that look simple (see on the right, it looks so obvious), it's not so easy to wrap the strings around tightly and evenly from one end to the other, and that's the sort of details where we spot a well-made rôtis (roast) and paupiettes on the butcher's refrigerated shelves. It must hold the meat firmly and not look messy whith hairy knots here and there. You don't use an ordinary type of string for this job I guess, and I think that Gérard brought his own, a professionnal one, it has to be natural, thin and strong, and stand the heat of the oven. This stage could be the most difficult part of this recipe.
Brushing the ham glaze
Now, right after the string tying comes the coating of the hams with a special and traditional French concoction named Arôme Patrelle. Like it's written on the company's website, the arôme Patrelle is a coloring agent which is 100¨natural and is made with glucose among other things. The website goes on : a few drops are enough to get a beautiful finish on your dish, making it both savoury and good looking. It is widely used for charcuterie dishes like pâtés, terrines, hams and grilled chicken or ducks, but its usage is very diverse, like you can also ad a few drops in a soup or vegetable stock for an aromatic plus. This sauce was invented in the second half of the 19th century by a family company created in 1852 and based in Les Lilas, which was then a charming village right near Paris. The Arôme Patrelle has sometimes more to do with color than with with the aroma, like stated for example in this wild-boar ham recipe (in French). But it's still aromatic, with spicy notes, coffee and caramel.
Smoking hams in the fireplace
Now is time to smoke these hams. Jacky has been in the woods the previous day in a spot where he knows wild juniper is growing and he cut a few branches for this smoking stage. He'll do the job in the fireplace of his outbuilding; there, it doesn't bother anyone when the smoke gets so thick that you must open the door and go breath outside... as you know, smoking ham or fish was an ancient way to preserve it and store precious food for the future. Instead of having to eat all their hunted animals on the spot, our ancestors could spare some for later. The smoke, added to the salt impregnating the ham makes it harder for the micro-organisms to damage the meat, and you can really store it in a cool, ventilated place afterwards, if you don't have a refrigerator. The only down thing (which is a good thing for some) is that the meat tends to dry and that after a few months you will be asked to chew more than you might want. Few smoked ham on the market are made this way, with real juniper kept burning imperfectly so that lots of smoke comes out. the food industry uses wood chips at best but also other techniques that are supposed to replicate the taste and the benefits of real smoking, and we'll not list these techniques, they are probably as exciting as many biotech additives used to "correct" modern wines...
A perfect smoke-licking on the hams
The hams are being hanged inside the chimney above the fireplace, you can guess them on the two pictures above. The couple of hams have been hanged relatively low but Jacky says that it's also possible to hang them much higher with a rope. This way there would be less risk that the hams get damaged by a broken-out fire, but the smoke would be also less concentrated when reaching the meat. That's something the food industry would have a hard time to replicate : look at my twin pictures above, this precise and concentrated smoke wrapping gently the hams here, just keep it going for the right time and you will have a perfect smoking process. Jacky says that it's the challenge, make sure that the fire keeps going but at the same time prevent the whole thing from flash burning. That's why he keeps this shovel to calm down the spreading fire, and he also has a bucket full of water on the side if the fire gets out of control.
A wine for smoked ham
A week or two after the hams were smoked, I visited Jacky again. He had put the hams in the freezer after having sliced them, that's his way to keep them for months if necessary and avoid having them dry slowly and become less pleasant to eat. The slices were very soft looking and the meat was very pleasant to eat, unusually tender for a smoked ham and very tasty. I had brought a bottle for the occasion and asked for the cat to be allowed on the table, it made such a cute pic. I had hesitated between completely different wines for this pairing story, I considered using a Pinot Noir, maybe from the Loire or from southern Burgundy, or a Pineau d'Aunis (man, this variety gets along many things...), or a gastronomy rosé like a rosé des Riceys or a Tavel or a Noble Joué, but for some reason I chose a Syrah from the Northern Rhone made by Dard & Ribo. The reason of my hesitation was that I didn't know if the ham was very salty, moderately salty, strongly aromatic on the smoky side or not. My choice was so-so, the ham was not very salty, it was very tender and almost tasting like raw (it was not, don't worry) with a discreet smoky side. The St-Joseph was juicy, with fruit and sap (says B.), a beautiful wine with lots of length but not not in perfect balance with the dish. Pairing is sometimes a try and miss and this was the case here : separately, I enjoyed the two things, but they didn't need to be taken together. A rosé de caractère will be my choice the next time Jacky invites me to enjoy a few slices of his home-made smoked ham...
A walk in the woods
We went walking in the very same woods where the juniper branches were cut to smoke the ham. Isn't the Loire diverse and awesome ?
Comments
I love your series of wine pairing stories. In this one, the deck was stacked against you, however. In my experience it's difficult to find any wine that pairs well with smoked meat, whether it is smoked ham, bacon, Texas beef brisket barbecue, smoked pork shoulder, or whatever. I usually find that beer is a better match.
I think the St. Joseph was a good idea. Even if it wasn't perfect, it was a good concept--the wines can be bacony and savory. A Tavel is almost too easy...
And if I haven't mentioned it lately, I love these photo-essays.
Yes, Tom, I now think that smoked ham is an enigma for wine pairing, every ham is different, that's the problem...
B. was dubious about my choosing the St Jo but like Dave says I think it might have been almost a good choice, among other possible wines.
Yes, Steven, this isn't exactly an organic pig but this is the real world and many people in France can't afford the still expensive organic pigs, except if they raise them themselves. plus, the 1-Euro per kilo doesn't mean the meat was of a worse quality than the normal-priced pork, it is just that the supermarket renounced its margin for this special sale.
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I love your series of wine pairing stories. In this one, the deck was stacked against you, however. In my experience it's difficult to find any wine that pairs well with smoked meat, whether it is smoked ham, bacon, Texas beef brisket barbecue, smoked pork shoulder, or whatever. I usually find that beer is a better match.
Posted by: Tom in Houston | April 08, 2010 at 12:39 AM
I love! I remind me familly moments! Very good! Thanks
Posted by: Cécile Costa et Jean-Michel Krebs | April 09, 2010 at 09:50 AM
I think the St. Joseph was a good idea. Even if it wasn't perfect, it was a good concept--the wines can be bacony and savory. A Tavel is almost too easy...
And if I haven't mentioned it lately, I love these photo-essays.
Posted by: Dave Erickson | April 10, 2010 at 02:41 PM
Great post, Bert!
Posted by: Jack Everitt | April 10, 2010 at 04:21 PM
CHATcuterie! Get it!
Posted by: Earle Wines | April 13, 2010 at 06:27 PM
One Euro per kilo pork, raised in a factory? No thanks.
Posted by: RYJ | April 14, 2010 at 05:17 AM
Yes, Tom, I now think that smoked ham is an enigma for wine pairing, every ham is different, that's the problem...
B. was dubious about my choosing the St Jo but like Dave says I think it might have been almost a good choice, among other possible wines.
Yes, Steven, this isn't exactly an organic pig but this is the real world and many people in France can't afford the still expensive organic pigs, except if they raise them themselves. plus, the 1-Euro per kilo doesn't mean the meat was of a worse quality than the normal-priced pork, it is just that the supermarket renounced its margin for this special sale.
Posted by: Bertrand | April 14, 2010 at 04:58 PM