Deli Ham Recipe & How To
If we Czechs love something for breakfast, it's bread roll with butter and deli ham. It's not as typical breakfast anymore as it used to be. Still, whenever we go to some ski resort and get it served, we suddenly get nostalgic and eat about four of these.
Deli ham still holds a special place in our family menus. But since we like to be more informed about what we consumed, we also started paying more attention to ingredients in our favorite foods. Here, we have a classification system for the quality of the deli meat - standard, selection, highest quality. This system tells us the percentage of protein in the ham or the percentage of meat compared to other additives like fat, water, and conservators.
As it turns out, making deli ham at home is super easy, you get the highest quality for the price of the standard, plus it is a fun weekend project.
What you'll need:
Ingredients & Tools
Pressure ham cooker
plastic bag
High enough pot
1 kg meat (pork, turkey or chicken breast)
curing salt (Praganda in Czech)
iced water
Instructions:
First of all, prepare the meat. Cut out all the tendons left, if you don't want any fat, you can cut that out. I usually boil those parts in water for my dog just so I don't throw it away.
Now when you have clean meat, cut it to 2x2 cm parts and take a handful and mince that amount. Put all the squares into a bowl, add curing salt, and start mixing. You basically need to break the protein in the meat, so it starts to release slime. After ten minutes of mixing, you can slowly add the iced water and the minced meat.
You can mix all this by hand, but also you can use a kitchen robot. In a robot, it takes approx 25 minutes, by hand 30 minutes. Oh, and use gloves because the salt can burn on the skin.
After you mixed everything, transfer the meat into a plastic bag that you prepared in the ham cooker, wrap the free end, and close the cooker tight. Leave overnight or for 8 hours, at least.
Cooking
The water should reach 1 cm below the top. The ham cooker is usually sold with a thermometer, so place it to the water first and measure the water's temperature. As you bring it to 80 degrees Celsius, you can lower the heat and measure the temperature inside the ham. It will slowly increase in an hour and a half to two hours. Once the temperature inside the meat reaches 70 degrees, keep it for ten minutes, and then it's done.
Don't open the cooker yet. The ham needs to chill thoroughly, so put it outside or to some cold place - not the fridge as it will increase the temperature inside. Just wait for it to be room temperature and then you can put it in the refrigerator and let completely chill.
Once cold, you can take it out. Pull the plastic bag up and be careful; there's water inside the cooker. Cut your ham and enjoy it.
Since it's fresh, it will last more than regular store-bought ham. I recommend to cut the brick to three separate pieces and wrap them individually, so you use one at the time and don't make unnecessary exposure to oxygen. You can also freeze it or vacuum it. If you are sure you won't use all brick, you can cut small pieces for pasta carbonara and freeze them.
One last thing, this is a basic recipe so you can play with it. A good combination is adding a little bit of honey, some spices, capers, nuts, garlic, or rosemary.
