Black Ham VI - The Recipe and Calculator
The final part the story of the Black Ham, the previous post is here:
Black Ham - Part V - Cooking and the Finished Ham
For anyone wanting to make a similar Black Ham, this is the recipe I used. I've adapted it to use Cure #2 rather than Saltpetre as this will be what most people have and is easier to weigh. Please bear in mind the comments I made about changes to the cure in my previous post (Link above):
Important This recipe must be used in a ratio of 2 parts meat to 1 part brine. The cure below is for meat weighing 2kg. For all other weights of meat please use the calculator below. The meat should be cured for 10 days per kilo or pro-rata. This cure is not recommended for meat above 3.5kg in weight, without adaption.
Black Ham
Beer (Porter or Stout) 601gm
Water 145gm
Salt 100 gm
Molasses (Muscodavo) sugar 45gm
Molasses 100gm
Cure #2 gm 9.4gm
Whole Spices
Black 6 Peppercorns
Coriander 6 Seeds
Juniper 4 Berries
Cloves 2 Cloves
All the ingredients with the exception of the cure are placed into a pan and brought to a rolling boil for 2 - 3 minutes. They are then allowed to cool. The cure is added and mixed well in to ensure that its fully dissolved. It's then ready for use.
...or you can use this cure calculator:
There are six comments
Hi
I can see no reason why you couldn’t dry cure this and then marinade it in a brine (without cure) to get the flavour. As it uses nitrate, I would go for a minimum cure time of 10 days though. This will allow sufficient time for the nitrate to react with the bacteria in the meat and do its work.
I would try and keep the brine concentration above 10% (around 40º) to give protection to the meat during the marinade period.
For larger pieces of meat cured only in brine, I would re-calculate the brine to be able to cure for less time per kg. However, this gets into an area where curing is at a fast pace – so it’s easy to under or over cure.
Hi Phil. My name is chris I love your web page, you’re the best. And how you can find time for all of that. you must have 4 hands or more.Any way, I am Polish and have acces to only: Insta cure #1 and #2. But all polish recepies use Peclosol. Please tell me how I can convert Peklosolt to Instacure #1 and, or #2. Please help me.Please help! chris.
Thank you.
There’s a calculator for Instacure and Peklosol here:
http://www.wedlinydomowe.com/sausage-rec..
Don’t forget to add/reduce salt by the same amount as the difference in weight of the Instacure and Peklosol.
I hope this helps.
Phil
Hi Phil. I have been using Brines for wet cure for sometime. Like everyone else I have had to convert my recipes from Saltpetre to Prague powder based cures.
I can’t help noticing that you have used Instacure #2 in this conversion. You obviously know more about the subject than I. I have converted all my brines as advised by the manufacturers to instacure #1, do you think this is wrong? The product data given to me suggested that #2 was mainly for the dry cure of sausage type cures.
My grandfather was a butcher/baker in the 1950’s. He always encouraged me to use brines, but that was his way! With saltpetre brines it didn’t matter how much water was in the cure as long as you noted the ingredient content which we used to use a 2.5% ratio method. Is this the same with instacure as I have noticed quite specific quantities to ratio with water?
Cure #2 (instacure #2) is used in this recipe due to the long timescale – over 30 days. The nitrite provides short term protection, and the nitrate longer term.
Brine curing is very hard to calculate as it’s dependent on the ratio of meat to liquid. The levels of curing salt used in today’s cures are a fraction of what would have been used in the 1950’s.
The ‘quite specific quantities’ are because of this, along with the nature of the calculator, and the comparative small amounts of meat cured by people at home.
I hope this helps
Well done, this is a lot of hard work. I think I will try and make it easier by using a simple dry cure first, as possibly considered in Part 1 (I cure whole legs for around 5 days in a mix (with nitrite etc) and then 2 weeks with just dry salt) and then brine. What recipe adaption are you thinking for over 3.5kg as whole legs could be 6 or 7 kg.