Category: gammon

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gammon orange wine

gammon with a mulled wine glaze

I cannot get through the Christmas season without having a gammon nearby. And most years I come up with a new glaze to finish it off. I’ve blogged about lots of them. This year I wanted mulled wine with my gammon.

it’s very salty and strong, a slightly sweet flavour as well it’s one of my absolute favourites. We call it gammon in the UK: it’s the hind leg of a pork but just the top part so you get that big round of meat. just one of those weird quirks of Butchery that we have a joint called the Gammon which is a basically like bacon but a big joint of bacon or ham. like bacon it’s cured and usually smoked not always but not ready to eat. It needs cooking.

You can roast it in the oven, you’ll get a more intense flavour and it is relatively difficult to keep it tender with this method as all the fat in the joint is on the top – hardly any runs through the meat itself. You can cook it sous vide which I’ve done on this channel before where you have a lot of control over the cooking. Today I am going to cook it in the more traditional method of simmering on the hob with a load of aromatics. This is usually root veg and hardy herbs. The finished gammon is usually juicy and fairly mellow. Some people like to do a quick first simmer before replacing the water to remove impurities, I find this doesn’t seem to be a thing any more.

Mulled wine is a warm, spiced concoction that’s perfect for chilly evenings. It’s a blend of red wine, typically a robust one, infused with spices. Common additions include cinnamon sticks, cloves, star anise, and citrus zest, to make it rich, warming and aromatic. But to some extent it’s up to you what’s in the mix.

To prepare this comforting drink, you gently heat the wine with the spices, allowing the flavors to come together. Sweeteners like sugar or honey are often added to balance the robustness of the wine and enhance its overall warmth.

It’s perfect for the colder months and as such favoured at Christmas. I confess to also enjoying mulled cider too!

This recipe is very straight forward. Simmer the gammon for a couple of hours, then baste in a reduced mulled wine. It’s dead easy to do – the main thing to watch out for is overreducing the wine and burning your pan.

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mulled wine gammon

Course Main Course
Cuisine English
Keyword ham
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 3 hours
Total Time 3 hours 10 minutes

Ingredients

  • 750 g smoked gammon joint any size will do
  • assorted root veg for the stock onions, carrots, etc
  • 350 ml mulled wine
  • 1 clementine or other small orange citrus
  • 1 heaped tablespoon icing sugar

Instructions

  • Put the gammon in a large pot with any old veg and if you have it, a spoon of black peppercorns and hardy herbs like bay. But no worries if you don't. Cover with water, bring to a simmer and bubble away for about 2 hours. The gammon is cooked when a skewer is inserted and removed easily. Allow it to cool in the broth for 30 minutes.
  • Meanwhile reduce the mulled wine. Add the halved orange and icing sugar and boil really hard. Keep boiling and bubbling until it is sticky.
  • Preheat the oven to 200°C. Transfer the gammon to a rimmed baking dish. Baste the meat in all the wine generously and place in the oven. Every 5 minutes pull the gammon out and spoon on the glaze that has collected in the pan. Keep going for 20-30 minutes until the glaze has hardened and crystallized. Remove from the oven and carve.

Video

Notes

If you don't have any mulled wine, take a full-flavoured or robust red wine and simmer it with cinnamon, star anise, nutmeg and other sweet spices. 
Categories
champagne food gammon ham marmalade

champagne and marmalade ham

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.

Here’s to next year’s ham!

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champagne and marmalade ham

Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

  • 5 kg gammon ham joint
  • 2 carrots
  • 1 stick celery
  • 1 onion halved
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tablespoon black peppercorns

For the glaze:

  • 1/2 bottle champagne
  • 2 tablespoons marmalade
  • 1 sprig rosemary
  • Cloves to decorate

Instructions

  • 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.
Categories
gammon ham honey

sous-vide gammon with honey

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.

Here’s a video version of the recipe:

Make sure you check out A Glug of Oil’s recipe for sous-vide gammon too!

Sous Vide Supreme gave me a machine to try. Here’s the Sous Vide Supreme machine that I’m using https://amzn.to/3llT97r

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sous-vide gammon with honey

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 minutes
Cook Time 6 hours
Servings 6 people
Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

  • 1 kg smoked gammon joint
  • 1 tablespoon honey
  • 1 leaf bay
  • 1 teaspoon fennel seeds
  • 1 teaspoon black 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. 
Categories
food gammon ham

salted caramel ham

Yes, yes, salted caramel is uber-ubiquitous. But I love a sweet glaze on my ham, such as honey or maple syrup, 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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Bake for 15 minutes, then baste with more caramel.
  5. 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.
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