Buy salt in bulk!
Will it be a cooked ham or air dried ham? For cooked hams, see Hilarysmum's posting a page or so down.
For air dried hams, buy a few kilo's of salt - we use ordinary Saxo or Waitrose's own brand. Put a thick coating all over - you need 2 people for that, one to lift the leg up in all sorts of ways whilst the other empties tub after tub of salt all into every nook and cranny. Curing takes 1 day (or more) for each 1/2kg of meat, so easily 2 weeks for a whole leg. If it's still squashy, keep on curing it until firm enough and no more moisture leaches out.
If you put the box that houses the meat at an angle, the juices run into a corner rather than staying underneath the meat - we just put one side of the box on hubby's big boots, they give the perfect angle!
Once it's cured, you rinse off all the salt, pat the whole thing dry, and leave it to air dry. For this actual air drying, there are 2 options:
1) put it in muslin and let it dry for 6+ months somewhere cool, in which case there will be harmless dry mould growing all over it, which stays on there until you scrape some off when you want to eat a bit of ham
2) put pork fat all over the exposed meat (in which case you won't get the mould covering), then pepper on the fat (to keep bugs off) and again in a muslin ('cause a leg covered in cloth is easier to handle than one covered in lard, and we're paranoid).
The fat stops the skin from drying out and hardening - if the skin dries out, the moisture from inside can't escape anymore and the meat will rot inside.
We used whole pepper but I suppose ground pepper would have been more economical.
As for the muslin / cheese cloth: cheap white cotton pillow cases from the supermarket are the perfect size.
Tie some string around the trotter bit where the meat hook is inserted so that nothing can go inside the pillow case (spiders in the loft!
). The meat hook came from our butcher, and the ham was hanging from an old clothing rail.
Last year we used a whole 8kg leg which took a few weeks to cure. We've used smaller pieces of meat since, but we'll try a whole leg again next time. Only, the next whole leg will be without the bone still in there at the top, as we don't have one of those special wooden holders to set it into for easy slicing (as they have in the deli's). After 5 months or so we tasted it, and ended up taking the whole thing apart in large pieces because of the slicing issue, with some eaten straight away and the rest put back to continue drying. The flavour changes between months 5 and 10+.
As for the weight that needs to go on top of the meat to push the juices out during curing, we didn't have enough tins!
Plus it was the biggest plastic box we could buy but still not quite big enough, so the leg was sitting at an angle and the tins rolled off. So I confiscated hubby's drill, wrapped it in tea towels and lots of cling film, and used that as a weight. Got some funny looks from the Amazon delivery guy
That whole leg was started last year October and although it tastes really good, it's not really
dry despite spending all summer outside... But even though it's not bone dry, it hasn't rotted either, I keep on being amazed at the power of salt!
I'm thinking of putting dried herbs in both the salt cure and the lard next time...
