Trimming a Ham

My humblest apologies for taking another lengthy break between blog updates. A lot has happened in the last few weeks as I continue to figure out what I’m supposed to do with all of my wonderful culinary training. For now, I’m happy to say that I’m still working at the Fatted Calf store in San Francisco. The store’s been open a little over two months and business has been good, especially as we ramp up for the holiday season. The other day we took delivery of about 50 turkeys ordered on behalf of our hungry customers.

I don’t really have much of an excuse for yet another semi-hiatus from writing but I will say that I’m amazed at how much harder it is to write when you come home from work both mentally and physically exhausted. When I was first hired, I was working behind the counter five days a week. For the last few weeks, I’ve been mostly working in the store’s small kitchen, helping to prepare the daily lunch specials while also brining, cooking, smoking and deboning various beasts to be used for sandwich specials or to be sold in the butcher case. It’s been much more intense than my behind-the-counter experience, at times feeling much more like working in a restaurant than working in a retail store. The pace can be quite harried at times and I have a nice new collection of burns and random cuts but I feel like I’ve been holding my own while learning how to work at ‘kitchen speed’.

Over these last few weeks, I have also become quite adept at boning out a duck and smoking picnic shoulders and my knife skills have benefited greatly with daily use. Occasionally, in addition to my regularly scheduled sandwich-making and meat smoking duties, I get to play around with large cuts of meat, such as this 25lb ham.

This specimen was harvested from a happy hog raised on a Becker Lane farm in Iowa (for anyone that’s curious). The task presented to me was to trim the ham so that it could be placed into our display case and sold to a happy customer. In order to accomplish this, first I’d have to remove the leg. I used the boning knife to trace around the circumference of the leg, slicing through the skin and meat until I reached the leg bone.

Next, using a hacksaw (those tools in the first picture are not just for show), I sawed through the leg bone, freeing it from the rest of the ham.

There is a bone that needs to removed prior to certifying the ham as ‘ready for sale’. The ‘H-bone’, as it is commonly referred to, is a large and irregular shaped bone that connects the back leg to the rest of the hog via a beefy ball joint.

I used a boning knife to begin separating the meat from the H-bone. By holding the boning knife sort of like a dagger and taking small strokes with it, it is possible to essentially peel the meat away from the bone, using the knife and your fingers to trace the outline of the bone.

It’s hard to make out here, but roughly in the dead center of this photo below is the ball joint. The ball part of the joint will remain with the leg bone in the ham while the socket part of the joint will be removed as part of the H-bone.

After a few minutes of poking, prodding and scraping, the H-bone has been removed. The thing that looks like an eye in the center of the picture is the ball joint at the end of the leg bone. That bone will remain in the ham until we decide to ‘bone it out’ (aka debone it).

There is also some miscellaneous debris that was removed from the ham – the last remaining vertebrae and whatnot – which are visible in the above picture in the bottom-right corner of the ham.

With all bones removed, I tied the ham up using a few doubled lengths of string. In my tenure at the store, I have gotten quite good a tying a mean slipknot. The ham is tied so that it will hold it’s shape during cooking, thus helping to promote even cooking throughout the roast.

Here she is, all ready to be placed into the store’s display case.

Yes, we put out the trotters along with the ham and yes, people do buy them. On more than one occasion, I’ve been asked to cut large trotters like this one in half for customers. Doing things like this makes me happy that I am no longer sitting behind a desk creating pivot tables for people. I certainly never got to use a hacksaw or handle pigs feet in any of my previous jobs.