Cooking Time: 25 to 26 hours
Serving: 1,200 - 1,300 people
Degree of difficulty: Moderate (depends on adult beverages)
Ingredients
- 1,050 pound of pork hams (preferably 17 - 20 pounds each)
- 2 cords of hickory wood
- 22 gallons of Patterson’s Mopping Sauce
- 2 gallons of white vinegar
- 2 pounds of salted butter
- 1 quart of lemon juice
- 2 pounds of salt
- A new cloth mop (of this variety)
- 8 or 10 large pieces of cardboard (furniture boxes are great)
- ~30 concrete blocks
- 6 3’ x 6’ steel welded racks (these can usually be sourced from salvage yards - or if you’re really adventurous, get your local metal working shop to build them: support local businesses!)
- 2 flat shovels
- 2 55 gallon, steel burn barrels with access hole in bottom with rebar rack to hold up burning logs (see images)
- 20 Long stem thermometers
Directions
- Around 29 hours before you plan to serve, start your hickory fires in burn barrels (this will ensure that you have coals to begin cooking the hams in the next step).
- Around 25 to 26 hours before serving, arrange all hams, flesh side down, on the cook rack over two courses of concrete block. Cover completely with cardboard including the ends. Push stemmed thermometers through the cardboard evenly, around 3 feet apart.
- Shovel coals under the hams and close all air holes with cardboard. Try to maintain a temperature of 175 degrees on all hams throughout the cook. When the temperature falls to 150 degrees, add coals.
- After around 12 hours, combine the vinegar, butter, and lemon juice in a kettle and heat over an open fire. Turn the hams, skin-side down. Dip the mop in the vinegar solution and mop all the hams. Recover with cardboard and apply more coals. Cook at 175 degrees for 12 more hours, adding coals as needed to maintain the temperature, usually every 30 minutes.
- Around 4 hours before serving, insert meat thermometers into various hams to determine if there are any cool spots on the racks. Rearrange hams to complete cooking - temperature throughout the ham should be around 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
- About 1 hour before you begin to chop the meat (see the next step), heat Patterson’s Mopping Sauce in a separate vessel (we use a large turkey fryer)
- If you have a buffalo chopper, mount to a 4 X 8 clean piece of plywood. If not, call 8 or 10 friends over with meat-cleavers (offer them adult beverages) and begin separating bones, skin and meat. Run through the chopper or cleavers. Apply 2 or 3 ounces of salt per ham and combine evenly.
- After each ham is chopped, add the warm Patterson’s Mopping Sauce to taste and mix well before distributing to 1,300 of your closest friends.