All About Jamón

It takes a pig consuming 11 lbs acorns to produce 1 lb of jamón ibérico.

The only thing jamón producers in Jabugo have to do for temperature control in the curing rooms is open and close the windows. #whylocationmatters

When cutting jamón ibérico, you know your slice is thin enough when you can see the knife through the meat.

In some jamón producers, pork is tested in labs on its way to being cured to assure proper consumption of acorns.

These are the kinds of facts you learn when you attend a ham tasting.  Of course, being that I’m reporting from the Iberian peninsula, we’re not talking about just any ham. We’re talking about jamón. Jamón ibérico de bellota pata negra.

At the 5 Jotas Cutting Workshop and Tasting, I and several other San Sebastián food world folks watched Iñigo Altuna, an expert slicer of jamón, show us how to properly deconstruct one of the 5 Jotas ham.

Maybe you’re not so familiar with the world of Spanish ham.  Most of it is delicious, but there are some key factors in differentiating an excellent ham from a run-of-the-mill cured pig. They are factors such as race. Is your pig Duroc? Or is it 100% ibérico? This is going to affect the growth rate of the pig and the flavor.  And then key is the nourishment your pigs are receiving. Acorns is the key word here. Climate, technique, and time are also keys. There’s no rushing this kind of perfection.

 

5 Jotas is a 100 % ibérico ham, whose happy happy pigs walk an average of 10 miles a day in search of acorns before they are turned into happy happy hanging legs, curing in the dry air of Jabugo. And you can taste it.

I like to imagine the four people they have preserving and curing ALL of their ham, working on their happy happy jamón assembly line: one to transport the pork legs into the curing area, one to oil the leg, another to brush it with salt, and the fourth to hang.

Which one would you be?  ( I call the one who eats it three years later).

sherry y jamón tasting

 Almost everyone interested in food has been to some sort of wine tasting. Maybe it was in the wine section of a grocery store or at a friend's house, maybe it was led by someone who knew their stuff or someone who was faking their way through it, maybe it was fun or maybe it was didactic. But whatever the level, the aha moments in tastings are few and far between. I'm talking about when something switches a lightbulb in your head, when a new concept or taste is extremely clear and obvious and revelatory.

A couple weeks ago I attended the Glutton Club's cata of jerez y jamón (sherry from Barbadillo and cured Spanish ham from Sierra de Sevilla) in Ni Neu. It was led by the grande Pepe Ferrer, who is so passionate he can talk for hours about sherry. And there were not just one but several of these AHA moments.

There was a man hand-carving two legs of jamón ibérico, dried legs of the happiest pigs around. They spend their lives in a leafy paradise and you can tell they've lived well when you taste the meat. The aha moment here was the careful carving of the different sections of the leg. Typically, when you buy jamón in a market, you have no idea what part of the ham you're getting. What's more, they carve by machines and don't differentiate their cuts according to the part of the leg.

I found that my favorite part is the rounded bottom, opposite of the hoof. Another aha moment came when we tasted the ham cut in lardon-esque shapes, small blocks of meat and fat (see the first picture, above). Instead of dissolving in your mouth like the previous delicately thin strips, they had a sweet, fatty chew. Awesome.

The sherry was another aha moment, for several reasons. The difference between the manzanillas and the amontillados was astounding. The palo cortado was the favorite, with an easy drinkability and rich flavor. The manzanilla was compared to paint thinner...and indeed had a sort of chemical smell. Also astounding was the way the taste of the sherry changed the experience of eating ham.

A night of surprises. And general glutton-esque behavior.