How a Guijuelo ham is made

From the moment we slaughter a pig until an acorn-fed ham is ready to eat, between 28 months (grain-fed) and 36 months (100% acorn-fed) go by. There is no way to speed it up without ruining it. The process is always the same; only the piece and the time change.

1 · Reception and trimming

The fresh pieces arrive from the certified abattoirs first thing in the morning. Each one comes already bearing its tamper-proof seal, placed at the abattoir by the Iberian Pig Interprofessional Association (ASICI), with a unique number that will stay with it throughout its commercial life. That seal is what guarantees that the acorn-fed piece leaving our cellar is the same acorn-fed piece that came in raw four years earlier.

Each ham is trimmed by hand: it is given the traditional V shape, excess external fat is removed and it is prepared for salting.

2 · Salting

The piece is completely covered in coarse sea salt and stacked in trays. It stays like this for roughly one day per kilo of weight: an eight-kilo ham spends eight days in salt. It is one of the shortest such processes in Europe: minimal salting is one of the hallmarks of Guijuelo ham and what gives it its characteristically low saltiness.

The salting chamber is at 0–3 ºC with high humidity. The salt penetrates the piece by osmosis and displaces part of the water. When the right number of days has passed, it is taken out.

3 · Washing and post-salting

The pieces are washed with cold pressurised water to remove the surface salt and moved to a post-salting chamber, where they spend between 30 and 60 days at low temperature (3–6 ºC). In this phase the salt distributes itself evenly through the whole piece, reaching from the outside to the bone.

It is a silent phase, with no visible activity. But it is where the salt balance of the piece is decided for the years to come.

4 · Natural drying room

The magic begins. The hams are hung in the drying rooms, which are buildings with large windows oriented to catch the air currents. There is no heating and no refrigeration. Temperature and humidity are controlled by opening and closing windows by hand according to the weather outside.

This is only possible because Guijuelo sits at a thousand metres, on the slopes of the Sierra de Béjar, with cold dry winters, short mild summers, and a constant wind regime between the Salamanca plateau and the two mountain systems that flank it.

The piece spends between 6 and 12 months in the drying room depending on size and category. It is where the ham loses much of the water it held, where the fat begins to redistribute, and where the first aromatic notes appear.

5 · Natural cellar

Once the ham has dried out enough, it goes down to the cellar. The cellars are the deepest part of the factory, where the temperature is stable all year round (between 10 and 16 ºC) and humidity is high and constant. There the hams are hung on poles and spend the rest of the cure.

It is the longest phase. Curing in the cellar lasts from one year (grain-fed shoulders) to more than three years (acorn-fed hams). It is where the ham completes its maturation, where the natural white bloom appears on the surface (a noble, desirable mould that protects the piece), and where the deep aromas and complex flavours that set a cured ham apart from a merely dried one develop.

Every piece is inspected, weighed and probed during this period by our cellar masters and by Guijuelo PDO inspectors. Probing is a quality-control technique: a sharpened horse bone (a cala) is inserted at specific points of the ham and smelled to detect any defect invisible from the outside. If a piece fails the probe, it is disqualified.

6 · Banding and dispatch

The pieces that pass every control receive the final Guijuelo PDO band (vitola), a numbered ring with the date and the piece number. That numbering is what makes it possible, years later, to trace which farm the pig came from, what it ate, when it was slaughtered and how long it spent in each phase.

From that moment the piece is ready to leave. We ship directly from the factory, with no intermediate warehouses, packed with materials specific to food products. The piece you receive has been in the factory since it was first hung, without passing through third parties.

Real curing times, product by product

These are minimum times. Many pieces are cured for longer if the cellar masters judge that they need it. The pieces selected as Summum are those that have cured beyond the minimum and shown the best organoleptic evolution.

What is not needed

This is Iberian ham cured the traditional way. We use no acids, preservatives, colourings, smoke or flavour enhancers. The only ingredients you see on the label are Iberian pork, salt, preservative E-252 (potassium nitrate) — also used in cured cheeses — and, in some grain-fed products, E-301 (sodium ascorbate), which is vitamin C.

To do it well you only need a good piece, a place with the right climate and the time it takes. We have been doing it this way since 1890.

See the catalogue →