Hamming It Up

Credit goes to Bill Smith of Chapel Hill’s iconic Crook’s Corner. During a cooking class on oysters that he presented, he happened to mention his family’s holiday tradition of corning hams. “Corning?” I asked. This sounded like a diversion that might lead to something truly rewarding — barbecue. He said that down in Eastern North Carolina when the weather turned cold and his folks slaughtered pigs, they often corned hams. He went on to explain the technique. They would simply cover the fresh hams with salt for 10 days or so and then cook them for the holidays.

His lip-smacking description of his cousins and uncles tucking into one of these holiday hams stuck in my memory and for the past three years, I’ve corned a ham for either Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. Last year, I got started late because I had to hunt high and low before I found a 17 pounder. Seven days before I baked it, as suggested in the recipe adapted from Smith’s Seasoned in the South (Algonquin Books), I inserted a knife into either end of the ham next to the bone and filled these incisions with salt. I then blanketed the ham with Kosher salt, tucked it and its large baking pan into an extra-large plastic bag, and stored the ham in the fridge. For the next six days I poured off the liquid that collected in the pan and replenished the salt daily. The night before I cooked the ham, I rinsed it, flushed the salt out of the incisions, and left it soaking in water.

The next morning I put the ham in a roasting pan and baked it “until the meat pulls away from the bone,” for over four hours–long enough so that I was the last person to make an appearance at Christmas lunch. I made a quite a grand entrance, but I think they were waiting for my ham rather than me.

My nephew and my sister started picking at the ham before the knife was even sharpened. “Even better than last year,” was the judgment, which drew others to the platter. It disappeared almost as fast as it was cut and pulled from the bone. And each time I’d see one of my cousins during the year, they’d ask me whether I was going to corn a ham this year.

Determined to get an earlier start this year, I had to compromise with a shoulder, unable to find a large ham which the butchers said wouldn’t be available until nearer Thanksgiving. I, however, corned it for the full 10 days this time and finished it off on the grill, trying to gild the lilly. In my view, the longer time and smaller size resulted in a taste that was too salty. And I don’t think the hour or so on the grill with pecan wood added anything, either. What I’m hoping is that someone else has combined corning and barbecuing and can furnish the clueless cue chef a recipe. Seems to me combining corning and grilling’s gotta be good.

The Thrill of the Grill in the Morning

Aldo drives his neighbors crazy. One neighbor three houses away can tell from her back porch what Aldo is cooking for dinner, lunch or breakfast. Yes, breakfast, which he kept urging me to come over and try and I kept saying, “Uh huh,” until he got tired of hearing me say “Uh huh,” and invited me to eat breakfast one morning before we snuck out to the city reservoir and went fishing illegally in the watershed — something I think Aldo relishes for the added danger of the whopping big fine added after 9/11. I expected a small fire and a modest meal. I was wrong.

When I got there, Aldo had enough coals to cook a suckling pig. I could feel the heat being radiated from the grill several feet away and worried about the hair on my legs below my bathing trunks being singed. “What are we having?” I asked, thinking maybe stuffed goat. “Bacon and eggs, with some sides,” Aldo said as he flopped some thick, smoked bacon onto a griddle that he’d bought at Lowe’s for five bucks. The griddle had holes in it and when the fat hit the fire, a blanket of smoke engulfed us. Of course, the trick is not to burn the bacon or the tomato slices that he added and not to let the whole grill burst into flames. The whole operation goes down in something like six or seven minutes and requires perfect coordination and controls. As the bacon is cooking and sizzling and smoking like crazy, Aldo flips his lid and moves a piece or two of bacon on top of the tomatoes, which are on another grill that doesn’t have holes it it. This flavors the tomatoes and provides great for the toast and eggs. At the last moment, Aldo adds a dozen or so egges a loaf of sourdough bread, a half a stick of butter and then works like a madman to get it all off at just the right moment.

Let me say that bacon and eggs under almost any condition are a treat for me as I usually try to get some grain and yogurt into my body in the morning, but as I tucked into the sizzling feast on my preheated platter, I realized that what made it so good is that everything was saturated with the sweet, smoky smell of bacon fat. The toast with fresh strawberry jam on it tasted just a tad like bacon, as did the eggs, whose broken yolks served as gravy for the tomatoes. And if you’ve never tried grilled, barbecued bacon, I’d advise not waiting until the weekend to do so. You might be in an auto accident or have a heart attack and die in a state of extreme deprivation.

What’s your Best Breakfast ever?

I Got the Beer Can (Chicken) Blues

A reader writes:

From: D.R. Hog

Professor B.B. Cue,
Please help solve a quandary for me. Ever since learning about Beer Butt Chicken in college, the act of “sitting” a chicken on an half can of beer and letting it cook on an outdoor grill, it has been a favored recipe. What has bothered me though is the question, is this technically BBQ or grillin’?
Do you have any recommendations on a good beer to use?
Thank You

D.R. Hog

Would someone tell me what’s the big attraction of beer can chicken and what about the paint on the can being submitted to hundreds of degrees of heat.  No less than Steven Raichlen in his BARBECUE! BIBLE calls it “some of the most moist, succulent, flavorful barbecued chicken I’ve ever tasted.” I find it makes the texture of the chicken seem slimy and the flavor is off-putting. I’m bound to be doing something wrong. Can anyone tell me. I use a Sears’ knock-off of a Weber with real charcoal.

In the Raw

If there were only half a dozen books on cooking that I could have in my kitchen, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, would be one of them. Why? Bobby Flay, Mesa Grill’s barbecuing genius, sums it up pretty good: “It’s the ‘tell me why’ for adults in the kitchen,” he says.

For instance, just the other day I was trying to defend my slow-cooked chicken against my wife’s insistence that it was raw and bloody. Admittedly its interior was as pink as could be, but it had been on the grill for hours. That’s when I turned to McGee. In the excellent index under “Meats/cooking” was “color.” On page 152, there’s a chart correlating meat temperature against seven characteristics: doneness, meat qualities, fiber-weakening enzymes, fiber proteins, connective-tissue collagen, protein-bound water and, last column, myogloblin pigment. BINGO!

This is not a book for someone who is not obsessed with meat and how it gets from the hoof to the plate, although the chapters on vegetables and fruit and, especially, coffee and chocolate are excellent. So here’s an advisory for any vegetarians who have gotten this far into a post on pink chicken: This is NOT about Chanticleer and Pertelote. It’s a post about dead animals and the chemistry of how heat tranforms blood and protein.

At any rate, in the chart McGee tells us that at 100 degree F. meat is translucent, deep red. At 120, it’s just beginning to turn opaque. At 130, it starts getting opaque and lighter red. At 140, red fades to pink. At that point, the “myogloblin pigment,” the last column tells us, “begins to denature.”

I should confess as at this point that I made a “D” in college chemistry (And it kept me from being elected to Phi Beta Kappa, according to one of my friends on the faculty) and all of this is a little over my head (and some of you out there might be able to explain it better). But my not knowing the molecular intricacies of what’s exactly happening doesn’t keeping me from finding all this riveting.

At any rate, back to McGee and his section on the “Persistent Colors in Cooked Meat.” Cooking methods, he says, “can leave well-done meat attractively red or pink . . . If it was heated very gradually and gently.” McGee’s got a great chart with great pictures molecules having FE+2 and FE+3 as a base and orbiting N’s and O2’s and CO’s. You can read about myoglobin and cytochromes and how when they take a long time “to reach the denaturing temperature . . . the other protein finish denaturing first, and react with each other. By the time that the pigments become vulnerable [to turning brown], there are few other proteins left to react with them, so they stay intact and the meat stays red.”

Not surprisingly, my wife who made an A in chemistry, was unswayed, and still wouldn’t eat my rosy roasted red hen.