During our recent travels to Spain, Chris and I stayed for a week in the tiny town of Pozos. We had an incredible culinary week cooking alongside Chef Esme and hiking the local countryside. Chef had a number of cookbooks in his library and this recipe is a riff on Lomo Embuchado. I did not use pork loin, but instead butchered a couple of beautiful pieces of pork from a boneless pork butt that I had. My goal is to create a tasty cured pork similar to spanish jamon. It's still curing in the fridge, so the verdict is still out. Fair warning, this is not a typical recipe for Lomo Embuchado. Here we give the pork a garlic, paprika-infused pork fat bath. It took 6 weeks to cure in my curing fridge. The result is wonderful. Sliced thin, it's a garlicky Jamon. I highly recommend the effort to make this one.
Ingredients:
2 1/2 lb of boneless pork butt cut in a single round piece about 4 inches in diameter
Kosher Salt
1 tablespoon crushed black pepper
8 cloves minced garlic
6 oz of pork fat
2 tablespoons of pimenton dulce
1 beef bung diameter 4 inches (I get mine from sausagemaker.com)
Steps:
1. Weigh your pork so you know how long to cure it.
2. Dredge the pork completely in kosher salt and put into a zip-lock bag. Add cracked peppercorns (about 1 tablespoon) and seal the bag removing the air from it as best you can.
3. Place the bag on a baking sheet and put a second baking sheet on top of the bag. Place about 8 pounds of weight on the top baking sheet to compress the coppa. Put it all in the refrigerator for 1 day for each 2 pounds. If your pork is less than 2 pounds, cure it for less than 1 day. Timing is fairly important if you do not want an overly salty end result. For my weights, I use 3 cast iron pans.
4. Rinse the pork to remove all the curing salt.
5. In a cast iron skillet over low heat, warm the pork fat so it renders into the pan. Add the garlic cook for 15 minutes, until the garlic is softened and very fragrant but not browned. Remove from the heat and add the pimenton.
6. Smear the adobo all over the pork and set it aside for stuffing
7. Rinse the beef bung and cut the bung so that the entire pork will fit into it and leave some extra bung to be able to tie a knot.
8. Stuff the pork into the beef bung. If you have issues fitting it, trim the pork so it fits. Any trimming, fry up and enjoy. Tie a knot at the end of the bung.
9. Weigh the pork once again. This weight will be the baseline so you can tell when it has hung to dry long enough.
10. Hang in the drying chamber for 4 to 6 weeks, or until it has lost 30% of its weight.