Christmas ham, the full loin and some rolled belly

Today was another day of pork butchering and I moved onto one of the hams and the full loin from one side. I got Chris's help for the ham, we are wet curing it in a brine made up of salt, sugar, apple juice, herbs and spices including juniper berries, bay leaves, sage and cloves.

The brine was brought up to the boil and then left to cool completely, this is very important as you do not want to partially cook the ham with warm water. This ham is weighing in at 8.7kg, its a little lighter than the serrano ham but the trotter is removed. This is left completely submerged for 18 days in the fridge (or somewhere cold). I also put in the pork ribs that I removed from the loin and belly, I will leave them for 5 days.

When the ham is ready it will be washed and patted dry, then left out to air dry until the week before Christmas. It will then be left to soak for 48hrs in a bucket of water, then brought to the boil and simmered for 3 hours. The skin is then removed and the ham will be covered with its cooking sauce/covering.

I'm hoping to try a coating of honey & mustard, Chris is hoping to try what he has done for the last two years with apricots. Time will tell...

Nest was the full loin, usually this can just be boned or bone left in and cut up into chops, but we got back plenty of chops from the butcher so decided to do something different.

This loin was off the purebred saddleback, they are known for putting on thick layers of fat, some might say this is bad but the fat is top quality and is needed in making black pudding, sausages and even rendered down for use in cooking.

So I decided to split the loin and take the chump end off and make good roasts out of them, but I wanted to keep some of that snow-white fat.

I started by boning it out, skinned it and then removed a layer of fat, put the meat back on the skin and rolled it...