Hamburg, Germany (dpa) – The Italians have almost as much respect for the experts who salt their delicious mild Parma ham as they do for famous footballers.
German ham can receive a prize if the salt content is just right. Rolf Abraham, of Abrahams’ Ham at Seevetal near Hamburg, says: “salting is an art form”.
Almost every corner of Germany has a speciality ham to offer; preparing them demands as much expertise now as it did in the past.
The tender, mostly pork-derived cuts are a delicacy. Not even food scares can hurt their prestige. According to Thomas Vogelsang from the German Meat Industry Association in Bonn (BVDF), in 1999 every German tucked into an average of 4.2 kilos and cured ham made up half this figure.
Vogelsang says that more consumers are turning to frozen foods from supermarkets and that there is an increased demand for both thinly sliced and dried varieties.
“Ham is a very honest product”, says Carsten Gissel from the Hanover-based Gissel Institute for Bacteriology and Hygiene. At first sight, traditional methods of curing ham seem quite simple: salting or pickling in brine, drying or smoking.
Salt and brine are two of mankind’s oldest methods of food preservation: the Chinese were using them 2,200 years before the birth of Christ.
Salt desiccates meat and so prevents bacteria from causing decay. Gissel explains how ham gets its ruddy colour: “Nitrates are used in brine and they react with myoglobin, a pigment present in muscle tissue, to turn the ham red.”
The muscle fibres themselves determine how intense the colour becomes. The more mobile the animal has been, the darker the meat gets. In other words, older animals produce the darkest meat. A sow of 18 months produces meat that is redder than that of fattened pigs; game is darker still.
Ham-lovers have no time for meat treated with modern methods. Brine and salt can be injected directly into the animal’s musculature or circulation, speeding up the entire process greatly.
Specialities require a more patient approach. When drying ham, salt and herbs are rubbed into the meat by hand and the cuts are then left in vats, where the salt and meat’s own juices spread evenly through the ham over time. Depending on the size of the joint, this can take from 15 to 50 days.
At the end of it, a well-seasoned ham has the same salt content throughout. They taste better this way, the meat is both tender and optimally preserved. The cuts have to be dried for several hours if the are to be smoked.
On the other hand, normal dried ham hangs in special halls, different sorts requiring different lengths of time. Cooked ham gets heated to a temperature of 70 degrees centigrade after being pickled in brine.
From the Danish border to the Black Forest, Germany has a rich variety of ham to offer. The taste varies subtly from region to region. The ham can be uncooked, sliced, come with or without bones. Salt content, smoking and hanging time determine the end result. People use whatever the region has to offer when smoking ham.
Northern Germans find their local “katenschinken” especially delicious: it gets its name from the small chimney-less farmhouses, “katen”, where it used to hang from the rafters, drying on the bone.
Rolf Abraham says that people used to eat the well-ripened meat in springtime, when the cuckoo – and flies – arrived. Nowadays it gets smoked in modern, specially constructed units, but beechwood is still used to give it its flavour.
German poet Heinrich Heine called Westphalia, in north-western Germany, “the home of ham”. As with the northerners’ “katenschinken”, the local varieties are no longer smoked over beechwood fires in farmhouses, but in smoking chambers. The process can take up to 5 months.
Ham from the Black Forest in the south-west is now one of the nation’s most prized exports. Protected by E.U. regulations, it can only be prepared in the Black Forest itself, using traditional methods.
The meat is boned, scored and dry-salted, then it is flavoured with garlic, pepper, coriander and juniper berries. It gets its powerful smokey taste and dark colour from being smoked cold over pinewood shavings and brushwood.
Parma ham, similarly protected by the E.U., gets eaten these days as more than just a starter with melon. A good 3,200 tons were exported to Germany last year, according to Paolo Tramelli from the society which protects Parma ham.
Taking one year to ripen, the delicacy is cured only with sea salt and can be produced solely within the boundaries of the old Duchy of Parma.
