Every year on Christmas Eve I like to serve up a joint of gammon, that inevitably gets served up on Boxing Day as yummy leftovers. I’ve got a ton of gammon recipes on here, such as honey roast, salted caramel and more. This year I had an excess of champagne (disaster!) so I just had to use it.
The process is always the same, simmering the joint in a root veg-packed broth and followed by a brief roasting in a flavoured glaze.
With the addition of marmalade the bitter edge offsets the sweet meat really well.
Put the gammon in a large pan with the veg and spices and cover with water. Simmer for 1.5 - 2 hours until a knife can enter it with no resistance. Switch off the heat and leave to rest in the liquor for half an hour.
While the meat rests, make the glaze. Add the champagne to a saucepan and crank up the heat. Reduce by at least half and the liquid should be noticeably thicker. Add the rosemary, stir in the marmalade and simmer for another five minutes. Check the seasoning and remove from the heat. Preheat the oven to 200C.
Put the meat on to a baking tray lined with paper or foil (the sugars in the marmalade will bake on to your tray and be hell to remove otherwise). Stud decoratively with cloves. Coat the ham with a layer of the baste and pop in the oven. Every ten minutes add more baste, building up a glass-like crust. When it's ready leave for ten minutes to rest and carve, or pop in the fridge for another day.
It’s been four years since I last discussed the modernist technique of sous-vide and despite promises I never tried any homebrew recipes. Now, armed with a Sous Vide Supreme and Vacuum Sealer I can have a more serious crack at it. But first, for the uninitiated, what is it? Let’s experiment with a sous-vide gammon recipe.
What is sous vide cooking?
Brought into restaurants in the Seventies by Georges Pralus, the trade took to it as a simple way to cook large batches of ingredients and hold them at the right temperature. A bit like how when slow cooking you can let it go over by half an hour and it makes little difference. It’s a water bath, cooking food held under vacuum in a plastic bag.
Popularised by Heston Blumenthal banging the drum for scrambled eggs and steak, and popping up in just about every cookery show nowadays, sous-vide is now starting to penetrate the home kitchen. Step forward the SousVide Supreme. John Lewis stocked this model in September 2010 and following a wave of Heston-branded publicity, it’s making it’s way on to Christmas lists everywhere. And at £300+ it definitely has the gift price tag.
Why the price? The machine itself is fairly unremarkable to look at, but it’s precision is the key. The temperature must be stable to keep the food safe. Heston has run tests on this model where this was accurate by about 1/10th of a degree over seven days. And if it’s good enough for HB, it’s good enough for me.
I was talking with an ex-chef mate of mine who was skeptical of the safety of the process. He was always taught to get food above 65°C. In traditional cooking methods this makes sense as it only takes 30 seconds at that temperature to kill off the Big Three (salmonella, E.Coli and listeria), whereas at 55°C it takes around 15 minutes. Douglas Baldwin, author of an excellent sous-vide book, has an excellent discussion on this at his website.
What is gammon?
Gammon is a type of cured ham that is popular in many parts of the world, but referring to it as ‘gammon’ is mostly used in the UK and Ireland. It is typically made from the hind leg of a pig and cured using salt, sugar, and other flavourings, and often smoked. A gammon is the bottom end of a whole side of bacon (which includes the back leg), ham is just the back leg cured on its own. Gammon is used as an ingredient in dishes like ham sandwiches, eggs Benedict, and gammon steaks. It is known for its salty and slightly sweet flavour, as well as its tender and succulent texture. Some people prefer to cook gammon with the bone in, while others prefer to remove the bone before cooking to make it easier to slice and serve. In the UK gammon is often served at Christmas or Easter. I like to cook one early in the week and make several dinners out of it.
Cooking sous-vide gammon
I’m used to simmering gammon, but it must be just around the 100°C mark (not that I’ve ever taken a temperature). This was 62°C for six hours and came out great. My aromatics of honey and bay were subtle, but the texture was very firm. Rather than flaky or stringy this was meaty.
Sous-vide really does lock in the natural flavour of many foods. Or to be more accurate, the food never reaches the temperature where the cell walls burst or proteins start to denature, at which point flavour literally leaks or is wrung out. As with my sous-vide gammon, it never hit the point at which it gets to the flaky texture. The gentle cooking, while slower, cooks the food to the most tender point. It’s slightly bonkers, but completely great. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s going to creep into my kitchen more and more.
An unusual way of preparing gammon; held in a water bath for several hours and cooked in a sweet-spiced liquor.
Course Main Course
Prep Time 10 minutesminutes
Cook Time 6 hourshours
Servings 6people
Author Gary @ BigSpud
Ingredients
1kgsmoked gammon joint
1tablespoonhoney
1leafbay
1teaspoonfennel seeds
1teaspoonblack peppercorns
Instructions
Preheat your sous-vide oven to 62C.
Rinse your gammon joint in cold water to calm down the salty taste.
Vacuum seal your gammon joint in a food-grade bag along with the bay, fennel, peppercorns and honey.
Sous-vide for 6 hours. Slice and serve.
Video
Notes
Reserve the cooking liquor. Boil in a pan to reduce and drizzle over sliced gammon. For a glazed finish put the gammon in a very hot oven and baste several times over 20 minutes until sticky.
Yes, yes, salted caramel is uber-ubiquitous. But I love a sweet glaze on my ham, such as honey or maplesyrup, so why not salted caramel?
It’s not a fully developed caramel, more a syrup. But the flavours are there, and you get a salty-sweet kick with every bite. Make sure you hold back some glaze and baste the freshly-carved slices. After five minutes cooling it settles into a sticky sauce. If you can’t bothered making a caramel, golden syrup will work just fine.
Salted caramel ham:
450g gammon ham joint
2 carrots, broken up
1 onion, quartered
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
1 star anise
For the glaze:
75g sugar
50ml water
40g butter
A large pinch of smoked sea salt
Put the gammon and other ingredients in a large pan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer. Cook for two hours or until a knife inserted into the middle slides in easily. Turn off the heat and allow to relax in the warm juices.
Preheat the oven to 200°C. In a small pan melt the sugar and water together until golden brown. Take off the heat and swirl in the butter. Simmer for a further three minutes and turn off the heat.
Remove the meat from the stock and drain for a minute. Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper and place the meat on it. Baste with the caramel, adding a splash of stock if it’s too gooey.
Bake for 15 minutes, then baste with more caramel.
After a further 15 minutes remove from the oven and put the meat to one side to rest, sprinkling on the salt. Meanwhile add a trickle of stock to the baking tray to bring together the sauce and pour off into a bowl. Carve the meat, serving with the reserved caramel.
Student food can mean an endless diet of jacket potatoes. If this is the case you can ring the changes with my puffed-up potatoes and incorporate whatever you have in the fridge to round out your dinner. The whisked egg whites lift the stodge of dense potato and gives a soufflé-like finish. It takes a little longer to make than a regular “jack pot” but I think the finish is worth it.
(In the pictures they’re accompanied by sweet and sour peppers but this is optional – there’s plenty of sustenance in the potato!).
Approximate cost for main ingredients, excludes storecupboard ingredients (prices from Tesco.com 7th Oct 2012): 62p
Soufflé potatoes (serves 1):
1 baking potato
1 slice of smoked ham, sliced
Big handful of grated cheddar cheese
1 spring onion, sliced
1 egg, separated
1 teaspoon mustard
Bake the potatoes as you would for jackets, smothering with a little oil, salt and pepper and baking in a 180°C oven for about an hour.
Just before you take the potatoes out of the oven, whisk the egg whites to soft peaks. Mix the mustard into the yolks.
Take the potatoes out of the oven and leave to cool for a moment (this helps loosen the flesh from the skin and makes them easier to handle).
Using a teatowel to hold the spuds, cut the potatoes in half lengthways and scoop the flesh out into a bowl. Put the hollowed-out skins back on the tray.
Mash the flesh with the cheese, mustard, ham, spring onion egg yolk and mustard.
Fold in the egg whites and scoop into the empty skins. Put back in the oven and turn up to 220°C.
Take out of the oven in about 15 minutes, or when the tops have started to brown.
