Homemade ham: what equipment will you need for cooking?

There are many recipes for homemade ham — from simple and quick to complex and labor-intensive. Each recipe offers its own methods of preparing and cooking meat. We have collected the experience of the best sausage makers to talk about techniques that may be needed or will definitely come in handy when preparing homemade meat delicacies. You may already have everything you need, but you don’t know it! And spoiler: you can do without the ham maker.

Some people prefer to make ham from pieces of meat, but classic recipes use a mixture of pieces and meat, minced through a fine grinder or ground in a blender. It is important that the devices are powerful enough to work with frozen meat, since this is what technologists and chefs recommend to use.

By the way, a meat grinder does not need to have an attachment for preparing sausages. A sausage gun is best for stuffing the ham casing and forming a thick loaf.

A strange combination, but only at first glance. You need to marinate the meat for ham for quite a long time. The quick method takes two to three days, but technologists recommend marinating for five days, and some recipes suggest marinating for a week to two. This allows you to achieve a brighter taste of the ham, but during long-term marinating it is important to strictly follow safety rules:

• Wear gloves to avoid contamination of meat with microorganisms.
• Use a mixture of regular and nitrite salt for salting.
• Maintain a temperature close to zero (no higher than three degrees). Not all refrigerators and their compartments maintain this temperature, so it is optimal to use the freshness zone (zero chamber) and avoid storing on the top shelf.
• It is highly advisable to vacuum the meat before marinating.

By the way, a vacuum sealer will come in handy if you decide to heat-treat the ham in sous vide.

A culinary thermometer is needed not only during heat treatment, but also at the preparation stage, especially if you cook ham in the classic way from a very chilled mass. When chopping and kneading the ham mass, it is important to measure its temperature several times — it should not exceed 10 degrees. If the temperature rises while blending, place the mixture in the refrigerator for a short time.

Spices give ham a special bright taste. Culinary experts unanimously recommend using freshly ground spices — various types of peppercorns, cardamom and others. Although some people prefer to pound them in a mortar, the technical solution is always simpler, since the process of preparing ham is already quite labor-intensive. To do this, you can use either a mechanical mill or an electric chopper.

The device is a horizontal press that squeezes the ham mass into a special casing. At home, collagen casing is most often used, but there are other types. In principle, you can fill it manually, although it will take more time.

For home use or small craft production, a 3-liter pistol or syringe, designed for 2.5 kg of meat, is sufficient. Professionals recommend choosing a gun with a massive frame, rather than one with a clamp or suction cup, since such fastenings are less reliable.

Finally, we come to a device that seems indispensable for cooking ham! We carefully tested metal ham makers from different manufacturers and came to the following conclusions:

• They all work and are quite easy to use.
• Using a ham maker allows you to do without a separate thermometer (in many models it is built-in) and without a sausage gun (the meat is inserted manually, and the clamping mechanism creates sufficient pressure to form a loaf).
• The ham maker allows you to cook faster than without it.
• The ham maker can be used in various cooking appliances: in a slow cooker, oven, pan on the stove, convection oven, etc.

An old-style glass convection oven (using an expansion ring and increasing the volume of the flask to 12 liters) can accommodate three standard ham pots at the same time.

Professionals in the field of cooking ham and sausages consider the use of a ham maker to be amateurish pampering and claim that it produces more pressed meat, especially when using a fast cooking method at high temperatures. The fact is that the denaturation temperature of meat protein is from 40 to 55 degrees, and it is at these values ​​that the mass sets, becoming a single whole and retaining all the juices and fat. When cooking quickly in a ham maker, the product may turn out to be a bit dry, so it is recommended to use a baking bag to avoid loss of moisture. Then it is important to gradually increase the temperature to 70 and then to 80 degrees. It is advisable to measure the temperature inside the ham, which should reach 73 degrees. At this temperature, the ham needs to be cooked for 2.5-3 hours. A ham maker is often used to quickly prepare ham: for example, in an air fryer it is cooked for 40-45 minutes at a temperature of 235-260 degrees.

The correct cooking technology described can only be followed in appliances that are capable of providing a gradual increase in temperature, starting from low values, and then moving to higher values, and then cooking at minimum temperatures. Sous vide, slow cooker, oven, slow cooker are suitable for this — in fact, any kitchen appliance that provides the required temperature conditions, with the exception of the microwave and grill.

There are nuances to using sous vide: before cooking in it, you need to additionally vacuum the ham in the casing. For a multicooker or slow cooker, it is recommended to line the bottom with a silicone mat to avoid scratching the coating of the bowl.

As already mentioned, quick cooking allows you to get a tasty product that can be called ham, but in consistency and taste it will only vaguely resemble classic ham.

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Churchill said that those who love sausage and laws should not see how they are made. As for the laws, he knew better, but sausage and ham can be cooked at home. Not only observe the process, but also participate, experiment, try new things, eat healthy foods and treat your family and friends with homemade ham.