Not exactly professional - Brian
If you’ve been to Andalucia you know what Iberian ham is. In short its delicious – cured naturally for 6-18 months the same way it has been for who knows how long. Its not smoked and has a wonderful flavor; its also a dependable staple with any tapa.
If you’ve had carpaccio you’ve got an idea of how it is served – sliced so thin you can see through it and it melts on your tongue. Unlike carpaccio however, it is cut by hand from the leg of ham using a 14″ knife (carpaccio is normally sliced with a deli slicer). Not satisfied to just get my ham as a tapa or to pay extraordinary prices to get slices at the grocery store I bought my own ham leg. Yes, the entire leg, all 20lbs of it including the hoof, bone, skin, fat and meat; it sounds weird but its pretty common here, you see the ham legs hanging in stores and bars throughout Andalucia.
Piece of cake I thought, now we’ll eat like kings! Actually Milo does eat like a king as a result of this, more about that later. Cutting the ham slices is not quite as easy as it looks when you see someone do it in a bar. The technique seems simple when you see it – very quick back and forth slicing motions as if you are sawing the meat with the knife along the length of the ham; presto, thin beautiful slices!
Not quite. For starters you have to learn how to cut the skin and fat off and where the bones are within the leg; porcine gross anatomy 101. Next is trying to master the thin slice; I think I’ll have it nailed after a few more ham legs have passed through the house. Its bedeviling – the slice is often too thick, or so thin that you can’t make a very large piece because you slice off a very thin but small piece. Milo has been the very happy recipient of these too short but thin slices as well as the too chunky ones. If I so much as touch the ham knife now he goes into a frenzy waiting for the pieces to come his way.
20lbs of ham is a lot, even when you factor out the weight of the bones and fat. One of our friends here has thankfully made me the ham master whenever they have a party; we bring a large plate of slices and yet still have lots more at home. On the first “public” tasting of my own ham slices by a real Spanish person I was left with a polite “well its not exactly professional….”