Producing high quality lunchmeat or boiled ham at home is much easier than most people realize. However, in the case making boiled ham it’s hard for one to find starting fresh pork leg at a worthwhile price because nearly all of them go for commercial further processing. Finished hams are often allowed to weigh 10% more than the starting raw meat weight without requiring any water-added labeling. And, then there are the water-added and water & ham products; which are even more juicy. These “liquid assets” greatly facilitate high volume ham production as a lucrative enterprise. Happily for home processors, luncheon loaf making is much more worthwhile plus offers a wider variety of tastes and finished product textures. For this example I didn’t have to look any farther than my own home freezer for the starting raw meat.
Here’s a three pound, six link pack of recently made fresh Polish sausage and two, 1 pound packs of Choice ground chuck that were just removed from freezer storage. After sitting at room temperature for an hour or so they were thawed enough to start working with.
Partially frozen Polish links stripped from natural hog casings. I have found it easiest to stuff entire sausage batches then strip off casings if and when bulk sausage is desired. As far as maintaining the quality of freezer stored sausage is concerned, casings might help keep oxygen away from meat and the smaller diameter links freeze through much faster than bulk sausage packages.
Choice ground chuck cut into smaller chunks in order to reduce thawing time.
———————————————————————————————————-
3 pounds of sausage + 2 pounds of ground chuck = a 5 pound meat batch. By definition the Polish sausage was seasoned; plus contained some added water & sodium phosphate. Lunchmeat normally has a milder flavor profile so the only additional seasonings, for the addition on the ground chuck, was 1 TBSP of purified salt and 1/8 cup of dextrose. No more sodium phosphate was deemed to be necessary because one of the attributes of cure (Prague powder #1) is that it acts as a strong antioxidant. And, even a low level of sodium phosphate is enough to both aid in finished-product moisture retention and increase emulsifying capacity (product bind). The prescribed volume of cure for a 5 pound meat-block is 1 level tsp. Sodium Erythorbate acts as a cure accelerator, helps set & maintain good cured meat color and reduces residual nitrite in end-products. From what I have read, the sodium erythorbate amount should be about 1/8 of what cure #1 is; so 2 pinches of erythorbate were used in this batch. Meat processing ingredients are readily available at reasonable costs online; so I always have them on hand. The only other non-meat ingredient added to this lunchmeat formulation was 3/4 cup of water.
Notice the characteristic change in meat color brought on by the addition of cure.
Cure was dissolved in the water, poured over thawing meat then fisted in somewhat. Salt, dextrose and erythorbate were added then mixing continued periodically as the batch fully thawed under refrigeration.
Since cure accelerator was used I thought 5 hours was a long enough time to wait before preparing the loaf for cooking. The loaf was tightly patted into a pan/form, one thin layer (lift) at a time. Vacuum stuffers are used commercially to remove nearly all air pockets. Coarse ground black pepper makes a eye-appealing loaf topping; it also adds an intermittent peppery taste.
A bottom full of water was placed on the roasting pan to help provide light steam (humidity) during cooking. High humidity increases the transfer of heat into cooking product at any given thermal processing temperature.
With the lid in place, this large rectangular roaster makes a good primary cooking chamber for lunchmeat loaves. Such loaves are often cooked at around 165F, but the lowest setting on our gas oven is 170F so that had to do.
It took 5 hours for the cold-spot of the loaf to hit 155F. This picture shows 150, but the loaf had been out of the oven for approximately 20 minutes before it was taken. Hitting 160F internal for an instant is considered fully cooked in ground beef containing products. However, lower temperatures, held for longer periods of time (dwell time), can be used to achieve the same degree of pasteurization or sterilization.
The fully-cooked loaf was lightly covered with aluminum foil then immediately place in refrigeration overnight.
This picture shows a table knife that had just been dipped in hot water and was drawn along the sides of the loaf to loosen them from the pan. Next, the bottom part of the pan was placed in a hot water bath for a minute or so to melt fat and gelatin that might cause the unreachable part of the loaf to stick. When making loaves I normally use metal Pullman style pans, but since this was a small 5 pound loaf I opted to use a ceramic container. The next time I will definitely use the 5 pound size metal pan because I had a very hard time getting this loaf to dump out of a ceramic cooking container. I think heat from the hot water bath transfers faster through thin metal than through the thicker glass. Also, the facts that the pan had not been oiled and there was minimal cooking shrinkage likely contributed to sticking.
Due to the fairly high amount of lean in this loaf, plus adequate salt-soluble protein extraction, it had a good bind (stuck together well).
Here you can see some color contrast between the pork, beef and fat. At a comparable age, beef is darker colored than pork because bovine muscles contain a higher myoglobin content. Air pockets were kept to a minimum by tightly stuffing the pan.
I opted to cut the loaf into 4 nearly equal size pieces to facilitate making nice knife-cut slices. A meat slicer is not on my list of worthwhile home processing equipment.
First I fried some up for breakfast and had it with eggs.
Come lunch time I made me a big sandwich.
Flavor was good and overall this simple project turned out very well. Lunchmeat loaves do seem to go long way and I’m not big on refreezing meat. Therefore, producing lunchmeat may be most practical for times such as making Holiday party trays or for large Summertime picnics. On the plus side, you do get a much better idea of what you are eating and you might even impress some of your friends.