Homemade tasso ham recipe, for use in gumbo, beans, stews, soups, etc.

Homemade Tasso Ham Recipe

lb pork butt, boneless (you can debone it yourself

oz kosher salt

oz brown sugar

pink curing salt (Prague powder

C cayenne pepper (you can use less if

C black pepper, medium grind

marjoram

Tbsp allspice

dry mustard

Tbsp garlic

tsp celery seed

thyme

Slice the pork butt with the grain into steaks about 1-inch thick.

Combine the sugar, salt, and curing salt in a bowl. Make sure everything is very evenly distributed.

Dredge each piece of pork in the curing mixture on all sides.

Place the cure-covered pork on a rimmed sheet tray and refrigerate to cure for 4–5 hours, uncovered.

Brine the meat

Using your preferred smoking wood and Billows BBQ Control Fan, preheat your smoker to 225°F (107°C). 

Take the pork from the fridge and rinse it under cool running water.

In a medium bowl, mix together the seasoning ingredients. Do not add any salt, the meat has absorbed enough. 

Liberally coat the pork in the seasoning mixture.

Place the pork in the smoker and insert a probe attached to your Smoke X2. Set the high-temp alarm on the meat channel for 150°F (66°C).

When the high-temp alarm sounds, verify the temps with your Thermapen and remove the tasso from the smoker.

You can cut the tasso up immediately and toss it into a pot of beans or gumbo, but with this much, you&#8217;ll have plenty to store. Wrap it tightly or vacuum seal it and freeze it until needed. 

Season and smoke the ham

While the endpoint temp is what matters, it would still help to include some sense of the smoking time.  Is it just a few hours, or are we talking overnight?  If I put it on at 5pm, am I going to be babysitting it until midnight?  Otherwise, a nice recipe for an underutilized ingredient!

I am 62 years old and  have lived in cajun country all my life.  This is a great recipe for TASSO.

I have never seen it referred to tasso ham sold where I live.  It has always been simply called "TASSO".

I've smoked hundreds of shoulder and never, ever seen one that looked even close to that.  Hard to tell from the picture how its oriented with respect to the clavicle and the money muscle.  It actually looks more like a collar than any shoulder I've seen, but if I ever come across anything close I'll try the recipe....it sounds good.  I wouldn't go to the trouble just to use it for "seasoning".  My Signals awaits the dream shoulder :)

If the meat is preserved and smoked, why does it need to be stored in freezer. Is it just not dried out enough like a summer sausage would be?

with respect to refrigerating and freezing the completed tasso:  it's possible to salt cure pork shoulder and dry cure it so that it will keep indefinitely without refrigeration. as you say, though, we generally don't want it that dry. 

if someone wants to try doing it, check a recipe for lonzino--Italian cured pork loin. for salt cure my recipe uses .5% Insta Cure #2, 3.5% Kosher salt, and 2.5% sugar--all percents by weight of trimmed meat. naturally, the seasoning for tasso would be different than what lonzino uses. the meat is cured in the salt and seasonings (i wait until just before smoking to apply most of the tasso seasoning) for 1 week per inch of meat thickness. for tasso, cutting the pork shoulder apart to get rid of the really tough cartilage will yield pieces that are generally 1.5 inches to 2 inches thick. i cure my tasso for about 7 days in a brine cure, but a week would do the small pieces if the cure is applied to all sides of the meat with a rub.

anyway, after curing, you'd normally smoke as for normal tasso. but the Insta Cure #2 releases nitrite slowly over time--therefore, when using it you need to hang and air cure the meat. when i make long cure pancetta and Calabrian pancetta, i let the meat hang for a month so that it loses about 30% of its trimmed meat weight. with the smaller diameter pieces you will have for tasso, i would guess that 2 weeks would be fine, so long as the finish weight is at least 75% of the trimmed meat weight. 

yes, that's a lot of work. lonzino is worth it. not sure tasso would be. the more moist yet still concentrated, smoky results of a shorter cure followed by smoking are fantastic. and we have refrigeration to compensate for not completing a process that would have kept botulism at bay 150 or more years ago.

I live in Michigan and Tasso is impossible to find here in Yankee territory. It is an amazing ingredient in jambalaya (I recommend the Poorman’s Jambalaya recipe by the late great Paul Proudhomme). I bought a smoker primarily to make tasso, tho I can’t wait to try so many other things. One question, as I’m new to smoking: does this recipe need water in the water pan? I’m using an electric Masterbuilt smoker. many thanks for this recipe!

Made this last time with pork shoulder. Came out fantastic. Smoking some now made with pork tenderloin. Can’t wait to see how it comes out. I’m guessing that the pork tenderloin with less fat should make for a very lean Tasso.

homemade tasso ham recipe

Author : Martin

Ingredients

Instructions

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