For my birthday, I am lucky enough to get a certain amount of cured pork products. This year, it was a gift packet from Edwards Meats in Virginia. The sample included come uncooked ham slices, a packet of bacon and some sausage links, which I tackled one at a time.
I fried up the uncooked ham slices in a skillet and deglazed with coffee to make red eye gravy. They were very tasty, like a great diner breakfast ham, but extremely salty. Even with the high salt factor (and I have a high tolerance for salt), they were good enough to polish the whole packet, and the gravy helped cut the salt.
The bacon was very nice but not so different in quality from the Nieman Ranch bacon I get at Trader Joe's.
The sausage was very had good flavor but was better in pieces than eaten as a whole sausage. It's a dense sausage and, like the ham, quite salty. It's great cut up into small pieces, eaten with toothpicks or as an ingredient in omelets, greens or some other concoction (I bet it would be fantastic in jambalaya).
Overall, despite a pretty high sodium level, this was some good pork.
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4 comments:
Were the ham slices dried, maybe should have been soaked to leach out the salt, like a country ham? Don't take this as an insult...you have proven your affinity toward cured pork. It's just that that much salt seems excessive and might have been abated by some pre-cooking method or another.
Or maybe not.
A vendor north of me in northern PA gathers local wild leeks and chops them into sausage to die for. This year, during an extremely wet spring, I stuffed some into a bunch of wild morels, rolled them in egg wash and cracker crumbs and fried 'em up.
Heaven should be so good!
Sam, the ham wasn't dry, and I both read instructions and watched a video on their website which didn't include any soaking, but it may well have helped.
Fried leek-filled morels...that sounds just awesome! I want some of those right now.
By the way, congrats on your BT single oaks. I hope you'll tell us how they are.
I'm blown away by John's generosity. I hope I can live up to the already high expectations.
You'll definitely hear the results!
Oooooh.... Richness!
But next year, see if you can get a dry cured PEPPERED country ham. Divine stuff. I think I've only had them from Ohio and Virginia (whole) but yow, are they worth it.
Happy Birthday!
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