- Spam, it's the magical meat
you've seen your entire life.
Today, we're gonna break it down and try to make it.
(Ben growling)
(upbeat music)
Quick disclaimer, do not try this at home.
We are quasi-professionals.
Canning is incredibly dangerous.
The USDA takes it incredibly seriously.
And we want to, too.
- Let's pop open a can. Let's get to work!
Oh, it's a can of spam!
Let's see what we're working with here.
There's actually definition to it.
It's a fat. It's a meat.
This is well within our wheelhouse.
The thing is, they make it pretty easy
because Spam just puts their ingredients right
on the front label.
- Pork with ham. - I assumed.
- Salt. - I assumed.
- Water. - Makes sense.
- Modified potato starch.
- Potato starch, that's the bind.
- Sugar and sodium nitrate.
- I'm fricking hungry.
I came to work today.
Spam cheers.
Very salty, texture's creamy.
- They use six ingredients. We're gonna use six ingredients.
- We're gonna use pork shoulder with cooked ham ends,
salt, water, sodium tripolyphosphate,
try saying that three times fast,
sugar, and sodium nitrite.
- [Brent] All right,
so we got a 12-pound pork shoulder here.
It has 70% lean to 30% fat.
All we have to do is take the skin off, debone it, cube it.
We're good to go.
- Now that we have this skin off,
we're just gonna start taking the bones out.
We're gonna start with these ribs
and taking off the spine.
The head would go right here.
There's no head, thank God.
That gets weird and gross.
So, we're just gonna take all of this out.
So, we're gonna make a five-pound batch.
What's our ratio gonna be?
How much pork shoulder to ham do we want?
- 10, 15%.
- 10% ham, 90% pork shoulder.
- Sounds perfect.
- 100% magic.
We're gonna get our sizes down to about a 1/2-inch cube.
Then, we're gonna refrigerate them as quickly as possible,
get them as cold as possible.
The colder it is the better it will bind.
- Goal!
You can see from the mix, nice 70:30 lean to fat ratio.
I'm gonna throw this in the freezer, cool it back down.
Let's cut our ham. - Great.
Because this ham is so expensive,
we don't want to use the prime cuts.
So, we're basically using the ham ends.
It's all the little extra bits at the end that we need
to find a home for.
Because this ham is already cooked, this fat doesn't have
the structural integrity we really need.
So, we're gonna cut all that off and disregard it.
- We'll throw it in with the pork shoulder,
cool it down, set up the grinder, run around, do it again,
grind it up, grind it down, grind it all around.
- So, we have our mixture.
We have this grinder that just appeared
out of literally nowhere.
They had water listed as an ingredient.
We are going to add-
- Frozen water.
- Frozen water, 'cause we're fancy.
We're gonna start taking our very cold pork
and our ham.
I'm just mixing it in.
It's not like you need to grind one first over the other.
You want it to all be together.
We're basically making a meat cocktail.
So, you want to have some ice to go
with all the pork and fat in your cocktail.
So, this is a 3/16-millimeter in diameter plate
that we're going through.
This is kind of like your basic, like,
every man's grinder plate size.
One grind, not enough.
This is kind of like if we were making a sausage,
this would be great.
We're making like a classic Italian.
But whoa, no we are not.
We're gonna do the exact same plate and do,
whoa, whoa, whoa.
And do another grind.
That already kind of looks right.
- Yeah, that looks perfect.
Overall, definitely more homogenous,
but still you can tell the difference between lean and fat
which is kind of what we saw when we sliced
into the old Spam loaf.
Kinda looks like your brains, man.
- [Ben] Now it's starting
to look more like what Spam looks like.
- We have our grind done.
Let's get it back in the fridge
and measure out the rest of the dry ingredients.
- All four of these are serving a very important function.
Salt, obviously for seasoning, also helps with our bind.
Also, when salt penetrates an atom,
bacteria can no longer penetrate that atom.
Sugar, exact same thing.
Then, we have our pink curing salt.
The most important thing it does is prevents rancidity
in the fat molecules.
That's where rancidity really begins and takes hold.
Last but not leastly,
the pink curing salt helps keep botulism spores
from becoming toxins, which is gonna become very important
when Mad Dog here starts canning this stuff later.
- No botulism.
- And this is sodium tripolyphosphate.
- Oh yeah.
- It's a super-binder.
So, Spam was actually created, wait...
Here comes your history lesson, Brent. Are you ready?
- I'm ready.
- Can we get history lesson just written across the bottom?
Spam was created in Austin, Minnesota in 1937
by none other than Hormel.
And it was created as, like, a very cheap,
shelf-stable meat product.
But, it really grabbed ahold of the market globally, thanks
to a little thing we like to call World War II.
Guess what's not easily available during a war?
- Protein. - Yep, food of any kind.
As the war expanded, this food became like really,
really important.
And it stayed behind
and became a big part of cultures across the world.
Brent, we've come to your favorite part of spamming,
we're canning. - Yes!
What we have here are self-seal canners.
This is the only type of can that was actually available
to us.
It's something that the USDA takes incredibly seriously,
because canning food is a dangerous thing that you need
to be super careful about.
All right, so we have five-ounce cans here.
So, I'm going to put exactly five ounces in each can.
And Ben is going to use a spoon to smooth it out.
- In case you are wondering
where the closest Spam festival is to you,
there's one in Austin, Minnesota, where Spam was created.
There is one on Waikiki in Hawai'i.
But actually, you know where the ones I want to go to is?
- Cleveland, Ohio.
- Guam. - Guam!
- Guam has a Spam festival.
- Let's get our top slash bottoms on the cans, seal them up.
We are at the step where we are going
to finally can our meat.
What do we need to can our meat? We need a pressure canner.
The issue with using a pressure cooker
to potentially try to can something is that you don't know
what your pressure level is at.
Therefore, you don't know that you're actually
at the correct temperature.
We already got our water boiling,
just make the whole process a little bit quicker.
- [Ben] Oh, oh! - Oh!
Two ways that you can can foods.
Number one is boiling them.
That is a safe thing to do for non-acidic foods.
You need to introduce a pressure canner for meats, seafood.
Anything that has the pH higher than 4.6,
you need to pressure can.
When we're going to boil can something,
we're putting the can into boiling water.
Ben, what temperature does water boil at?
- 212?
- Close. - 220?
- There he goes.
- At 220, we're able to kill 99% of bacteria.
But, that one extra percent includes botulism,
which is the bacteria that can f****** kill you.
So, kill it before it kills you.
Pressure valve is up.
- Pop. - We got the pressure.
Our weight is going to keep vapor inside
and we're going to start getting our pressure valve up.
- Oh, there it goes!
It moved. I swear to God.
It moved.
- 12 to 15 PSI does guarantee you
a temperature of 240 to 250 degrees.
That's gonna kill some bacteria.
All right, we're at 12 PSI.
We need to maintain for 60 minutes.
All right, now we wait.
Staring contest, go.
- Okay, so three things are happening.
One, we're cooking.
Number two, we're killing all those microorganisms.
Third thing is the pressure is creating a vacuum
inside our little cans.
Ta-da! They're canned.
So now we, just let them take the slow road to Coolsville.
This is completely chilled now.
So, we're gonna pop the seal,
see what kind of goodness we got inside.
Do you think it's gonna make a popping sound?
- Yay!
What? - [Ben] Yay!
- Little air pockets there,
you know, a little gelatin on the inside.
- The particle definition is like very, very similar,
I feel like. - It's super similar.
- The feel's very similar. - Right.
Raw test. - Raw test.
- Yeah.
That is uncannily similar.
- Oh, he's been holding on to that one for a minute.
- Let's fry it up next to some Spam,
compare and contrast, see where we came in at.
The spam is caramelizing really well.
I feel like there's definitely more sugar in theirs.
So I mean, this is crazy.
Ours is sticking a little bit to the pan, where-
- It's like that slide at the waterpark.
- Spam is in and of itself a nonstick surface.
- Ready to try this guy?
- So ready.
- All right, let's do it.
- I don't know how they get that consistency
yet caramelize it so well.
- Let's do ours.
Cheers, tummy.
- I think we went the long way around
of creating a breakfast sausage.
- I feel like we actually, like,
came up with something, like, kind of close.
We're still nowhere near the salt.
- Right, shockingly.
- Yeah.
Well, what would you just say we gave ourselves,
like a letter grade.
- Letter grade, not to pat ourselves on the back,
but I feel like you just would get a B
for completing the project.
As far as similarity, I mean,
I feel like we're talking a B minus.
I got to say, I have a whole new appreciation
for what Spam is.
This is a really cool thing that we created,
but it it definitely doesn't compare to Spam.
- I agree. Nothing compares to Spam.
And I think that's ultimately the takeaway is,
like, Spam is Spam and everything else is something else.
- Absolutely.
- Hey Spam fans,
let us know what you think of Spam.
Let us know your recipe
and let us know the favorite thing you do with it.
Drop a comment.
- Thanks!