Ingredient: Ham - Air-cured
Category: Meat - Pork, Bacon, Ham & Gammons
Season: All
Curing hams by carefully trimming them, then salting the skin and exposed meat heavily and hanging it in an airy space so that the salt draws the moisture out and the flesh absorbs the salt back in is a very ancient art creating a ham.
It is succulent, gorgeously coloured and so hygienically cured that the whole leg will keep for years.
These hams were a speciality of mountainous regions.
The quality factors are good healthy pigs, the skill of the butcher/salter, fresh mountain air (or hillside at the very least) breezing through the special shuttered drying rooms and the time spent maturing.
Italy’s prosciutti crudi are the best-known examples of air-cured ham, number one in fame and production being Parma ham, the production of which is strictly controlled by law.
Prosciutto di San Daniele is made on a much smaller scale, and often from smaller pigs, in the hills of the Fruili.
Some Italian gourmets believe it beats Parma hams down.
Bayonne ham is the French equivalent.,
A Lake District, England version which is very good, made by Richard Woodall of Waberthwaite.
The air-cured ham the UK knows least well is the Spanish Jamon Serrano, which tends to be darker and more intensely flavoured than prosciutto.
Ordinary Serrano is a bargain , and the special (and very expensive) Jabugo and Jamon Pata Negra hams from free- ranging black pigs who eat plenty of acorns are surely among the best hams in the world.
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