Curing your own ham is a tasty alternative to shop-bought meat

Can there be anything finer with which to weigh down the festive table than a classic Christmas ham, scored, glazed with sugar, besprigged with holly, and emitting the seasonal fragrances of swine and Demerara? Only one thing, perhaps: a ham you have cured yourself.

I’ve been keeping pigs for about four years now, but on a strictly amateur basis. After some of my initial attempts at home-curing went wrong, I turned over the pigs to a wholesale butcher who would turn them into ham and bacon the industrial way – with an entire carcass soaked for several weeks in brine, before being injected with the saline solution to ensure the cure penetrated all the way through.

“Wet curing” is efficient – but does have downsides. The taste and, particularly, texture, can be negatively affected, and the meat retains water, which oozes out unpleasantly when you cook it.

Still, I was happy enough with my commercially cured meat. But then I tasted the “dry-cured” bacon hand-produced in small batches by my local butcher, Jim Murphy in Tullow, County Carlow, Ireland, and the scales fell from my eyes.

The difference in taste blew me away. Jim’s thickly sliced, dry-cure bacon doesn’t shrink in the pan, nor does it emit any filthy white goop. The bacon also handles very differently – unlike shop bacon, it’s not slimy and, as a result, is much easier to chop and dice. There’s no rubbery aftertaste, either.