Just Your Ham
Ham is a meat from a pig. This meat is the thigh meat. You can cook it or serve it fresh. It is known that the majority of ham in some fashion it is cured. In most parts of the world, the ham can be wet cursed or dry cured. What this means, is that dry cured means that the ham goes through a process where it is rubbed with a combination of salt and a variety of other tasty ingredients. On the other hand, there is also the wet-cured version. The wet-cured ham is cured with brine by the process of injection or immersion.
Being cured is not the only way to prepare ham. There are other variety of ways such as being cooked, aged, or smoked. However, the hams that are being sold at your local grocery store are usually wet-cured. Again, the wet-cured process involves the injection of a mixture of salt, sugar, sodium nitrate, sodium nitrite, sodium erythorbate, sodium phosphate, water, potassium chloride and other flavourings. The next step is cooking the hame at a temperature of one hundred and fifty degrees F. The effects of the chemicals and the cooking will remove any bacteria and will create a nice ham.
Ham is usually used as an ingredient for sandwiches such as the popular ham sandwich. Many different ham sandwich recipe are available online and on cook books. There is also the smoking process of a ham. This gives the ham a smoking flavour. A smoked ham involves smoking the ham by hanging it over some burning wood chips at a smokehouse. If it’s a hickory smoked ham, then that is smoked over a hickory. The ham cannot be injected with smokey flavour in order to label it a smoked ham. This is in fact illegal. Ham is also processed into other meat products such as the ever so popular and wonderful food product: Spam.
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