Though made in the same process, ham hocks are meatier than bacon. (They will last nearly indefinitely in the freezer if packaged properly.) Hocks are salt cured and smoked, which gives them an incredibly long shelf life. It is a subsistence food generally overlooked by most cooks, which tends to make it an ideal choice for low cost cooking.Īs for flavor, a smoked hock is cured in much the same way bacon is. In Southern cooking derived from areas hit hard by constantly poor times or from the dust-bowl era, the meat is separated from the hock and added back to the dish before serving. In my case, I got four hocks for just under four dollars and made enough soup to feed a family of five with leftovers for the next day. Hocks are generally sold in packages of two to four. Most cooks use hocks in the same way that they would use soup bones, cooking them with vegetables or beans to add flavor and then removing the hock before serving.
15 bean soup recipe stove top skin#
A hock is mostly connective tissue, fatty skin and, in the cases of the larger examples, a bit of extremely tough meat. While both of the latter give a lot of flavor to a dish (just ask the French about butter), the smoky, salty, purely porcine assault of flavors from a good smoked ham hock is absolutely beyond compare.įor those who have never used a ham hock, it is basically a pig’s ankle joint.
Very few things can bring joy to the heart of a Southern cook, even one who happens to live in Alaska, like the words “Smoked Ham Hocks.” When making a braised dish or a stew, even bacon and butter can’t hold a candle to a good hock.
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