Ready for the stockpot: ends and pieces of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham
A gift of collards from a friend’s garden made me realize I was out of the odds and ends of a smoked ham needed to make rich, flavorful southern-style greens. Time for an order of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham. I had previously purchased HSCHDS which is a whole ham pre-sliced and cryovac’d in several packages; this time I decided to purchase HSCHDT which is deboned and trimmed but not sliced.
The unboxing: the tears in the butcher paper are because the cat got to it while I was looking for my boning knife.
In my previous post, I noted that this distinguished product is just as smokey and salty as you expect; it’s also an excellent value compared to some competitors. I later found out, when a reader ordered her own ham and had some problems, that Benton’s also has kind and generous customer service.
Bits and pieces of skin, fat and meat as they were retrieved from the stock pot. This is about half the total output; the cat and cook snitched the rest.
This time my ham took a week to ship but then just two days to reach me in upstate NY, and the package when it arrived was not chilled but not spoiled in any way. I popped the big chunk of trimmed ham in the fridge and turned my attention to the ends and pieces which were wrapped up in two sizable packages of butcher paper. The first thing you want to do is take a sharp knife and carve out a few morsels of meat as a treat, just as you would sitting in a bar in Spain. But the rest of one package went into a pot which was then covered with water and allowed to simmer for maybe 3 hours.
At the end of that time I fished out the meat and skin, which had mostly fallen off the bone, then trimmed out gristle and remaining bone bits to leave maybe 3 cups of savory bits to use for seasoning greens and black eye peas. The meat bits retained their salty flavor and the skin was chewy and rubbery but entirely edible when chopped into small pieces.
Ham juice after a night in the fridge, with jello consistency due to the collagen in the ham bones
The bones were discarded and the pot went back on the stove to be reduced by about 1/3 over another hour of simmering. We now had ham juice… a concentrated elixir which set up solid over a night in the refrigerator. This is the foundation of the “pot liquor” beloved of Southern cooks. How would we use it? To be continued….
