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Coalcracker


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Smoked Ham Portion Really!
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I believe there should be smoked ham-police. They should go from store to store and arrest anybody who is selling a smoked shank portion of ham with the cushion showing and likewise if the bottom of the aitch-bone on the but portion is less than a one inch from the face.

Once upon a time there were set standards when merchandising smoke hams. We sold them whole or half and sometimes we would steal a center cut slice from the halves depending on their confirmation. When we put center slices on sale the following ad would be ham portions and vise-versa. So many things have changed nowadays. First of all the size of the portions. Their huge but size and weight doesn't' make a true ham portion.  

With a true ham portion the customer should never see the cushion on the shank portion. And yes it took some skill to leave one slice over the cushion. So my question is this; are todays portion a true portion or should that be labeled an end-cut?

Its sad because todays shoppers don't know. If you do a cutting test on a smoked ham and remove all of the center cut slices and get your price for them you can sell the portion for .99 cents per lb. and get an extra dime a pound for the butt portion and make a nice profit.

A true "butt" portion should be cut where there is a least 1 full inch from below the aitch bone to the ham face. Back in the day we measured by  the flat part of the knuckle on our index finger to make that measurement.

Back then  when semi-boneless smoked hams were all the rave, it took skill in cutting them in half. You had to locate the hip-bone generally with the tip of your knife or meat needle and then cut away from that bone. If not  you are going to have a large bone showing on the face of the halves. Today I rarely see semi-boneless hams in this part of the country. You see smoked picnics, whole or half, boneless hams of all kinds, spiral hams whole or half and ham portions. I very rarely see a half of smoked ham regular cut.

Spiral hams I guess are todays rave  but I don't like them. I like to carve my own ham at home  I don't have to worry about bacteria building up between the slices with left over ham. The other reason is the slices are too thin for me. And in the back of my mind I have a picture of when I visited the processing division of one of the premier supermarkets of this era. The spiral slicing machines were going from morning until night and never once were they stopped to remove juices, fat and all kinds of (I like to call ham-debris). Never washed and sanitized after so many hours of operations.



-- Edited by Coalcracker on Sunday 27th of September 2015 09:36:52 PM

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Phil ( coalcracker ) Verduce

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LP


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Center-cut ham slices should come from the center of the ham, I agree.

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Coalcracker


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LP wrote:

Center-cut ham slices should come from the center of the ham, I agree.

Hey LP, what's that in your photograph.  A leg of pork or your own leg? LOL>



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Phil ( coalcracker ) Verduce

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newbernbears


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Smoked ham police, yes sir, Coalcracker for SHERIFF. A pet peeve of mine too...

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Allen Scott
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newbernbears wrote:

Smoked ham police, yes sir, Coalcracker for SHERIFF. A pet peeve of mine too...

You made me feel so good that I am not alone! LOL>   



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Phil ( coalcracker ) Verduce

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apcowboy


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I have some home video about this, if I get time I will put it together to let y'all see how ham merchandising was done in the day



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Leon Wildberger

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Gregdabutcher


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Good point on the spiral cut. I never stop to think of the potential for cross contamination. Anybody notice that spiral cut hams seem to cost less than some non spiral?

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Gregory R. Wilson
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I work with old school meat men, we buy most our hams from a local ham company, no wrapper, just netting, we cut and merchandise a lot of differ cuts from them. we the only ones anywhere in our area that sell ham roast, most 2 to 3 inches thick. we made good money off them



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Coalcracker


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Bill_meatcutter wrote:

I work with old school meat men, we buy most our hams from a local ham company, no wrapper, just netting, we cut and merchandise a lot of differ cuts from them. we the only ones anywhere in our area that sell ham roast, most 2 to 3 inches thick. we made good money off them

THAT-A-WAY-TO GO BILL!!! 



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Phil ( coalcracker ) Verduce

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Coalcracker


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apcowboy wrote:

I have some home video about this, if I get time I will put it together to let y'all see how ham merchandising was done in the day

That sure would be great. Thanks Leon. 



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Phil ( coalcracker ) Verduce

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newbernbears


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Coalcracker wrote:

newbernbears wrote:

Smoked ham police, yes sir, Coalcracker for SHERIFF. A pet peeve of mine too...

You made me feel so good that I am not alone! LOL>   




No problem!

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Allen Scott
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A little of how we cut in the day

 

 



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Leon Wildberger

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young gun


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Cool video, like the graphics,   did y'all do many hams like that? 



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Coalcracker


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Young Gun, its the same old story and you have to connect the dotes. You see as Leon shows in his video there was such a thing as merchandising smoke hams. It was a big money maker if you knew what you were doing. But in today's world this is another "take away" from our trade especially in the big chain stores. So the "meat god" says. Hell, anybody can weigh up a : whole, half, portion or center slices of ham. Why do we need to pay those higher meat cutter rates.

They blame everything on either: food safety, inefficiencies, or sales per man hour etc. So out the window goes smoked ham merchandising. Look, supermarket store closings have grown to "epidemic proportions" many, many companies are in trouble. Reason? You've got to make a profit! The biggest draw in any supermarket is the "meat department", and well run meat departments made money, lots of money. But when a supermarket thinks that everything in the department should come in packaged and  cryovac that is the beginning of the end.

Stop and think about this for a minute. Most supermarkets receive cryovac; hams, portions of hams, smoked picnics, center slices and so forth. Here is the cycle of distribution;

1) The packer has to make a profit for slaughtering the hogs.

2) The smoked ham processor who takes the fresh hams and smokes them and merchandise them must make a profit.

3) Now the wholesaler, distributor need to make a profit, and if we talk about  the chain store warehouse they must cover their cost of delivery, maybe not a profit but there is both fixed and variable cost.

4) Now the product arrives at the supermarket and much of the profit is gone. Now back in the day all the above happened as well but the difference is " the meat cutters were able to merchandise the hams for additional profits"

Sorry for running off at the mouth but it just upsets the heck out of me.

 

 

 



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Phil ( coalcracker ) Verduce

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irishdude


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well coalcraker im about to make your head explode.

In Ireland or N ireland is a company denny the uses to do ok processed home cooked ham better than tinned stuff then it was all new york deli style ham on tv www.homeis.ie/

The water thin stuff is what im on about. Its all reformed bits of pig But it was marketed as being US like McDs and mayo which ppl dint eat. So wafer thin was what we should have like US delis.www.denny.ie/our-food/nutrition.aspx

Now they do a bbq style ham luxury on aback of tv shows like man v food fireandsmoke.ie/the-range/ham-range that link will make your head explode if you like bbq also. Bbq here is meat cooked in an oven woth sickly sweet sauce poured over it.

we do have good beef though

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irishdude


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But that is ham which we always buy as sliced as opposed to buying a bacon joint or a gammon whcih is cooked at home.

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Coalcracker


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Hey there Irishdue, hope all is well on the Emerald Isle. Although your reply is off my subject matter but now that you opened the door,  allow me to put my two or three cents in. I think between the cost of the equipment and advertising, Denny's has probably exploded their budget. LOL>

We have a few companies here in America that boast about "all natural" products too. One is Hormel and the other is Boars Head. However the term "natural" from a legal sense is meaningless. In our country there is no government regulations that I know of that will hold any manufacture's feet to the fire in a legal sense. Because of this the word "natural" as it relates to meat gets thrown around regularly. And this causes confusion for consumers. One thing that I know is that most of the processed meats including hams and cold-cuts (lunchmeats) contain high amounts of sodium (salt). Which leads me to believe that no mater how healthy in iron, protein, a meat item is, the fricken salt we do a person more harm than anything natural or unnatural. LOL>

I see that Denny's make a statement about how natural their product is and will back that up with hidden-documents if need be. That being said, I remember reading something several years ago about a process call HPP (high pressure processing). Now I'm no scientist and can't really tell you if this process is really natural or not. But how it works is that packaged products are put into some type of vessel and put under enormous pressure. This pressure is so great that it causes an bacteria and pathogens to EXPLODE! lol>

Now if you can't visualize this process, think of the last time you flew and your ears popped, well multiply that times 6000. This is relatively a new process and may have some legitimate results for the meat industry as a whole, however the machines are very costly. In excess of a million dollars per machine which no doubt will push meat prices up even higher. As far as I'm concerned when I shop for cold-cuts (lunchmeats) and or ham, I look for products with very low nitrate and nitrites. I try to stay away from those two carcinogens.

 



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Phil ( coalcracker ) Verduce

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irishdude


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Ive seen HPP on a tv show.

coalcraker there is a place in dublin that does this with seafood. This isnt there video but same thing.

www.youtube.com/watch

They can shell a whole lobster in 3 mins and you can eat it raw and eat mussels raw too.

What it does it puts pressure on it and separates it from the shell when the pressure is released.

zapping the bugs along the way.

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