Just to round off Abergavenny

Hey its Phill.
Saw someone from work in the airport and then bumped into Neil from Bar Lounge and Marc from The Chesterfields... Small world.
Just on the plane to Munich for our connecting flight, so thought it would be time well spent to pen a quick recap on some of my fave bits of the weekend.

On saturday afternoon, gem bought us tickets to a talk called 'the ham school' and it was all about jamon iberico! I was in my element. There were two guys from a company called Brindisa and the younger of the two guys, Marcus, has got a slightly worrying obsession with cured meat but it made the talk all the more interesting. Of course there were plenty of tasty treats including some freshly carved slivers off the huge jamon that was on the table.



I had no idea that there were about 6 different muscle groups along that bit of th jamon, with each bit giving a slightly different flavour and texture. It turns out that this ham is so expensive (the leg on the table is worth £500) because of the diet the pigs have. The pigs leave the main barn when they weight about 100kg and they then live out in the wild woods of extramadura for about 8months (this is called the Montenerro) once the pigs are ready they will have eaten about 600kg of acorns and put on about 50kg in weight.

Once slaugered the back legs are salted for 0.8 days per kilo (time varies according to region) and then once washed off, they are hung during the Seccadaro, where there can be anything up to 30,000 Jamon in one curing house! Each one of these is checked by hand by the ' masters of ham' and they test for tenderness by driving a sharpened beef bone into precise parts of the leg and then sniffing the bone.... Sounds dodgy if you ask me!
After the Seccadaro has finished, the hams are then hung in the bodega which is a dark damp cellar where specially created moulds are encouraged to bloom across the fat, and like good cheeses, the mould enriches the flavour. Apparently they even have 'Mould Terroire' with some Bodega selling their moulds onto other curing houses! The whole process can take up to 4 years before the Jamon can get the d.o.p (protected destination of origin) and they even come wth their own passports which can trace the pig back to farm, lineage and then they have the scientific breakdown of muscle mass and protein contents!
I loved all this, and cant wait to go to Western Spain and see it all for myself.

Location:Abergavenny