German Smoked Pork Recipe

Have you ever considered making your own smoked meat? This german black forest ham recipe or schwarzwaelder schinken is an easy beginner project for do-it-yourselfers which yields delicious and quick results. Authentic german black forest ham takes several months to make. It is cold smoked (low temperatures) and then air-dried. While that is best done by professionals, we amateurs can use some of the same tricks to mimic the taste and appeal of this schinken. That is especially important when we cannot buy the real thing. In this recipe, the meat is cured for 4 hours, then smoked for less than 2 hours. It uses traditional black forest spices and smoking with pine chips, as they do in the schwarzwald (black forest). Some smokers say to avoid pine chips at all cost because of the pine tars present, but this is how it is traditionally done in germany. This "Ham" Can be made from almost any piece of meat off the hog. I used part of the rib meat connected to the loin. This piece of meat consists of many smaller muscles held together by fat and sinew and is not often purchased for fresh eating. Because of the salting and slow cooking, the meat is tenderized and very tasty.