Spam is what this country is all about, two cars in every garage and a pig in every can. Spam tastes like America.

-Jonathan Gold^[1]

My name is Allan, I am a very serious chef, and this post is about making Spam-style luncheon meat from scratch.

I didn’t grow up eating Spam, but I have friends for whom it is a powerful piece of childhood nostalgia.

Spam is a pork forcemeat that is packed and cooked in a can. The overall effect is rather like a terrine, especially reminiscent of the cured pork meatloaves of Europe, like leberkäse. There is some speculation about the origin of the moniker. Is it an elision of “spiced ham”? An abbreviation of “shoulder of pork and ham”? These are all apocryphal, and the producer of Spam, Hormel Foods, has never published an official explanation.

I have a can of Spam on my desk. The ingredients are “Pork and ham, water, modified potato starch, salt, sodium nitrite.” I find it strange that they can include “ham” as an ingredient instead of parsing it into constituent ingredients (pork, salt, sugar, et c).

Let’s reverse engineer a homemade Spam, discussing each of these ingredients in turn.

• Pork. We will use pork shoulder. This is the default cut for all pork forcemeats.
• Ham. I find the presence of ham confusing. When I eat Spam I don’t taste any of the smoke or spice I would expect from ham. Are they really grinding up ham and folding it into the forcemeat? I don’t know why you would do that (besides to use up excess ham), but let’s try that.
• A note on texture, grind. The pork and ham are finely ground, but you can definitely still see individual pieces of meat and fat in the cross-section of sliced Spam; it isn’t a homogenous emulsion like a hot dog.
• Water. Spam’s soft texture suggests a relatively high water content. I would guess between 10-15% of the weight of the meat.
• Modified Potato Starch. Potato starch is a secondary binder. I usually add starches like this at 3.5% of the weight of the meat.
• Sodium Nitrite. For cured forcemeats I always dose Cure #1 at 0.3% of the weight of the fresh meat.
• Salt. When using nitrite I usually remove the weight of Cure #1 from the weight of the regular salt. However, with such a high water content, I’m actually going to increase the salt concentration to 1.7% of the weight of the fresh pork.

The full recipe and procedure are below. I have to say, it’s a very good stand-in for Spam. It has a firmer, meatier texture that the classic Hormel product. If you want something as soft as classic Spam, try increasing the water content to 20% of the weight of fresh meat.

Rest assured that work on replicating all of the Spam flavour variations has begun (see photo, right). I also heard a rumour that there is a canner/sealer somewhere at my work, so a proper canned luncheon meat version might be within our grasp.

Spam-Style Luncheon Meat

Ingredients

• 1050 g pork shoulder (2:1 lean to fat – you’ll likely need to add some pork fatback to attain this ratio)
• 17 g kosher salt
• 3 g Cure #1 (~5% sodium nitrite)
• 262 g ham, lean, unsmoked
• 21 g white sugar
• 128 g water
• 37 g potato starch

Procedure

1. Toss pork shoulder with salt and Cure #1 so that the salts adhere to the meat. Spread meat out on a bake sheet lined with parchment and chill in the freezer.
2. Grind ham through a 1/4″ plate and set aside.
3. Progressively grind chilled pork shoulder through 1/4″ and 3/16″ plates, re-chilling the mixture between passes.
4. Combine ground ham and pork shoulder with all remaining ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attahcment. Paddle on low speed for 60 seconds.
5. Cook a small amount of the forcemeat and taste. Adjust salt if necessary.
6. Line a 1.4 kgs terrine with plastic wrap. Fill the terrine with the forcemeat, taking care to press the farce into the edges and corners of the mould. Fold the plastic over the forcemeat. Cover the terrine with foil. Place the filled terrine in a roasting tray. Pour boiling water into the roasting tray so that it comes 1/2 to 2/3 of the way up the sides of the terrine.
7. Bake in a 300°F oven until the internal temperature reaches 155°F. Remove from oven and let stand at room temperature for 20 minutes to carry over to a final internal temperature of 165°F.
8. Remove the foil. Place a pressing plate on top of the terrine and weigh with 4 x 1 kg weights. Chill overnight.

Yield: 1 x 1.4 kg loaf Spam-Style Luncheon Meat

Notes

1. This most memorable Spam quote is from Gold’s review of a place called Mago’s. The review was collected in the LA Weekly Books publication Counter Intelligence, page 194.