Ingredients:

By consensus, Joselito based near Salamanca in Guijuelois, is regarded as the best ham maker in Spain. Both Ferran Adrià and Joel Robuchon serve Joselito Jamon in all their restaurants. Rafael García Santos, the highly influential Spanish food critic, rates the Joselito Gran Reserva at 9.75 out of a possible 10—which in his view makes it the best food product of any kind in the country. Seeking insight into the mysteries of jamón ibérico, we enlisted the men who run Joselito, a fifth-generation family firm: José Gómez, the company CEO, who oversees the curing plant; his brother Juan Luis Gómez, who supervises the farms; and Germán Arroyo, the export manager. We started at the source, during the montanera, the pigs roam the woods for six-month gorging on acorns. By the time they commence this final feast, the pigs are about two years old. Government regulations allow manufacturers to call any pig an ibérico if its parentage is at least three fourths from the ibérico breed. Although some types of pure ibérico pigs are red, golden, or spotted, most are black with black hoofs (which are included in the whole ham)—the reason that pata negra has become a synonym for ibérico. This montanera is a critical point in the process. It's the pigs' diet that sets apart jamón ibérico from other hams; in fact, the breed is important primarily because—athletic, drought-tolerant, long-legged—it is accustomed to eating very little during the dry summer and devouring as much as 20 pounds of acorns daily in winter. At the start of the montanera, the pigs are very hungry. "To fill the bottle, first it has to be empty," Juan Luis Gómez says. Watching these pigs forage is a fascinating experience. In the wooded pastureland, called the dehesa in Spanish, the two most common trees are the holm oak and the cork oak. The holm acorn is sweeter. In early winter the pigs disdain the acorns of the cork oak, leaving them to litter the forest floor. Instead, they root through the underbrush with their pointed snouts and inhale the holm acorns, crunching down on them and letting the shells fall to the ground. Later in the season they will return to the rejects and scarf them up. As a result of this gluttony, a pig can easily gain a pound and a half a day, until it finally tips the scales at 360 to 400 pounds. To ensure an adequate supply of acorns for such binges, each pig must have about four acres of the dehesa. This factor is what keeps the price of the best jamón ibérico so high and the production so low. The highest category—jamón ibérico de bellota, "bellota" being Spanish for acorn—comes from animals that have put on at least one third of their weight by eating nothing but foraged acorns and grass during the montanera. Ibérico pigs with a diet less heavy in acorns are classified as recebo; if they have eaten solely cereals, pienso. In an average year, there will be 4.5 million ibérico hams, but only one tenth of them are bellota. Even among the bellota hams, Joselito separates the largest and best shaped, distinguishing them as Reserva hams. Because the acorn crop varies each year depending on rainfall, ibérico ham is as vintage-dependent as wine. The acorn-rich diet transforms the fat of jamón ibérico de bellota. Studies from the University of Extremadura indicate that more than half the ham's fat content is monounsaturated (the type that is in olive oil) rather than the artery-clogging saturated kind usually found in animals. Significantly, at room temperature the ham's fat virtually melts, like a vegetable oil. "When the pig is slaughtered, an analysis of the fat is done," Real Ibérico's Ullibarri explains. "You can see the correlation between the amount of acorns eaten and the percentage of oleic acid—which melts at room temperature—in the fat of the animal." At Joselito, salting, curing, and aging are done as they have been for centuries. In the factory in Guijuelo, the only mechanical contraption is a button that opens or closes the windows in the drying rooms to regulate the temperature. In the winter, following the slaughter, the hams are piled up and kept in hills of sea salt for nine days. The smaller the ham and the colder the weather, the less salt is required. "We try to use the minimum amount of salt," José Gómez says. "Salt makes the curing process quick, but a ham with a lot of salt, if you keep it for a long time, becomes heavy like concrete." The salt is then washed off, though some has already entered the meat, and for the next three months it migrates inward to the bone. "We need a cold and dry period," Gómez says. "Then comes the curing, when the white fat turns to yellow, in summer. We also need an in-between period in the spring, when the ham adapts to the heat of summer." Curing takes nine months. After the first 30 days, the hams are covered with a blue-gray patina of mold. "A normal customer in the shop, if he saw the mold on the ham, he would throw it in the dustbin," Gómez says. "But this is what gives it an aroma." In the summer, as the hams sweat off the fat, the odor of the mold penetrates the meat. (From the time of slaughter to sale, the hams lose a third of their weight.) In modern facilities, like the Jabu plant that Joselito owns in Jabugo, technology has been harnessed to reproduce the temperature and humidity of the seasons. At the top-of-the-line plant in Guijuelo, however, nature is permitted to call the shots. Depending on their size (big hams are aged longer), the hams spend 18 to 20 months in the drying rooms. José Gómez says that a large Joselito ham can be kept for seven years. Deep purple with striations of yellow fat, it was redolent of the nutty flavor of acorns. Almost five years old, the ham was still in its prime.

Minimum curing time: 36 months

Size 8.600kg

Lot No 110111001

Consume By 16.7.12

Ingredients: Acorn fed Iberian Ham, Sea Salt