Museo Del Jamon

This little station of savory splendor is the best place for meat lovers to meet their meat and explode with the excitement that only a fine piece of ham can elicit. Like a church for the worshippers of all things pig, this place is central to the passions of Spanish cuisine and cannot be understated as the home of ham. Museo Del Jamon is a chain of food shops in Spain specializing in ham products. After the 2009 Christmas season, Spain was left with an "unwanted ham mountain" as supply outweighed demand. An estimated four million hams remained unsold, and were thus given away to Spaniards as promotional items, or sold at discounted prices. This can be compared to the foie gras crisis in France; 14 tons of it were given away to charity after it was left unsold following the holiday season. Until recently, Jamón ibérico (Spanish ham), was not available in the United States. Prior to 2005, only pigs raised and slaughtered outside of Spain were allowed to be processed in Spain for export to the United States. In 2005 the first slaughterhouse in Spain, Embutidos y Jamones Fermín, S.L., was approved by the United States Department of Agriculture to produce ibérico ham products for export to the United States. The first "jamones ibéricos" were released for sale in the United States in December 2007, with the bellota hams due to follow in July 2008. The basic jamón ibérico is priced upwards of $52 a pound, and the bellota is priced upwards of $96 a pound, making these hams some of the most expensive in the world. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=118956