My First Disaster

OK, that may not be 100% accurate, I have had other mini disasters like my tomatoes and courgettes last year, but nothing really serious. That all changed yesterday I am afraid when I finally cut down my first ever homemade parma ham. This particular ham used to belong to our pig called "Sausage", so it had a certain sentimentality attached to it.

I will admit that I had my doubts as to whether everything was OK with the ham, but I thought at worst I might just lose some of it. When I cut it down yesterday, 9 months after we hung it up all that changed. First of all there were maggots happily living underneath the double layer of muslin I had the ham wrapped in. Trying to be optimistic I said " It could still be grand if we just cut a little away where the maggots have been chomping. How wrong I was. The picture above shows the sight that greeted me when I cut into my precious ham. Needless to say the air turned blue!

We thought we had done everything right and in fairness all our other attempts at charcuterie turned out great. However as you can see this was a complete disaster. The basic idea with this kind of ham is very simple, you bury it in salt for a set period and then hang it up somewhere nice and breezy for months on end. Where we went wrong I reckon is not burying it in the salt for long enough. They say up to about a month for a big leg, but I only had mine in for 15 days. The reason for this is that I had read online that if you leave it in for a month it will be a bit salty when you come to eat it. Big mistake! The salt is what preserves it. So next year I will put it in the salt for longer. In the meantime though I will practice with some bought pork, maybe a loin and see how I get on. I certainly don't want to waste another full ham by getting it wrong.

As I was cleaning up after the surgery on the ham I looked out the window and was greeted by this sunset. I suppose even with the odd porky disaster life here isn't all that bad!