Yup, Ham was darkening through the cheese cloth pretty good, but I think it may be affecting the overall color in certain areas.
So Mr. T, not to piggyback your thread, but I feel it would just add to this thread for anyone attempting to do this in the future to have some pictures of multiple Country Cured Hams so they can see variations. That being said, here comes the pics!
Took the ham out of my smoker last night, now it's got about 60 hours of slow smoke from my AMNS using Pitmaster's blend. Hot damned this thing smells like HEAVEN! Every inch of it just smells divine. Now my color range is pretty odd, but it was more or less the same before I started the smoke, so at least it's consistent. One thing I noticed about my ham that I do not see in others are the veins in the skin and some areas where it looks like it bled a bit under the skin where you can see that it is red.. not that nice smooth skin tone that you had on your Mr. T. Funny thing is that this was not a store-bought ham, it came from a half hog my wife and I bought from a local farm. Due to the visible veins, I was wondering if that was a sign of it being injected with hormones,. etc. but the wife tells me that one of her friends is very touchy with meat processes and that is why she buys it from this farm, all natural, no hormones/antibiotics, etc. I checked their website and all it says is "Free Range Pork" so who knows... any ideas on what caused these veins to be visible (been there from the start) let me know..
So I took it out of the smoker, cut the cheesecloth bag off and then took some pics. It still had a bit of the brown sugar on the surface that I rubbed on it before the smoke, so you may see that in the pics. I then washed it off and got off as much of the sugar as I could, went out to the garage and used my grinder to carve one end of my S hook into a sharp point and then estimated where I might get lucky and stab it between that hock bone and I think I got it! Hangs nice and free now and looks like the hook is seated in there nicely. I will smoke it the rest of the way like this so I can get a more even color. You will see some areas nice and brown and others more pinkish. Not a nice smooth overall color like Mr T's. Put it back out there in the smoker today with the last of my Hickory dust, 2 more 4lb bags on the way from Todd, should be here tomorrow! I too will smoke this until I get the desired color and will post up how many hours it took.
Time for the pics!
See the veins in this pic and the pinkish hue to the skin area here? You can also see the little red bloody spot to the left..
A little bit of pattern here from the salt coming through and the cheesecloth..
Little bit of white mold growing here (good mold) - and no signs of black mold..
Pic of hook where I pierced the shank..
Here you can see ground down point of my S hook coming through the end
Hangin up!
Had to toss this baby in there too since I was running the AMNS.. Mozzarella String cheese (I thought it was Armenian string cheese, but that has caraway seeds in it and is overall a much better flavor..).