Division 4.3.2 Boneless ‘Pražská šunka’

The period before the Second World War saw the development of alternatives to the original ‘Pražská šunka’ on the bone. These took the form, firstly, of pasteurised boneless ‘Pražská šunka’ produced from pork-leg muscle meat. It was produced by Antonín Chmel at U Zvonařky in Prague and by Josef Beránek at Beránkové podniky, his firm's plant. The technology used to produce these types of ‘Pražská šunka’ consisted in boning refrigerated fresh pork legs, processing individual parts of them, sorting them according to their colour and mechanically and intermittently breaking up the raw materials whilst adding sodium chloride and the necessary amount of sodium nitrite and sugar, all partially dissolved in a specific quantity of brine. This was followed by pasteurisation and refrigeration. After the Second World War, the production of pasteurised ‘Pražská šunka’ was mainly concentrated at meat-industry plants at Brno, Kostelec, Studená, Vamberk and Planá nad Lužnicí. The late 1970s saw an increase in production in these plants of boneless ‘Pražská šunka’ using moulds and the subsequent packaging of the end product in plastic containers, which on the one hand eliminated the use of cans but in particular meant that, after pasteurisation, the product could be smoked and made it possible to add a thin decorative layer of pork fat or pork fat and skin. The product and its parameters have therefore been brought significantly closer to the original ‘Pražská šunka’ on the bone. Since 1989, boneless ‘Pražská šunka’ has been produced at other sites across the entire Czech Republic.