Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Festive Ham

More Hot Ham Water...




3.5kg gammon
2 litres cranberry juice
2 litres apple juice
2 cinnamon sticks, broken in half
2 onions, halved but not peeled
1 tbsp allspice berries

For the glaze:
Approx 30 cloves to stud the ham
4tbsp cranberry jelly, or 6tbsp cranberry sauce
1tbsp runny honey
1tbsp English mustard powder
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon




Put the gammon into a pot and cover with cold water and bring to a boil, then immediately drain and rinse in a colander (or leave in cold water and soak overnight).
Rinse the saucepan and put the gammon back in and add all of the ham ingredients (not the glaze ingredient). If the fruit juice doesn’t cover the ham, add some water. Bring the pan to a boil and cook at a fast simmer for about 3.5 to 4 hours. Partially cover with a lid if the ham is sticking out at all getting dry.
Once it’s cooked remove it from the pot and let it cool till you can touch it. Cut and peel off the rind, and trim some of the fat, leaving only a little. Preheat the oven to 220c. Score the fat into diamond shapes, and stud the points of the diamonds with a clove.
Heat the remaining glaze ingredients, till the jelly (or sauce) melts, and it forms a smooth glaze. Let it bubble till it gets syrupy. It needs to be thick enough so it doesn’t run off the ham as you cook it.
Sit the ham on a piece of foil in a roasting tin. Pour the glaze over the ham so all the scored fat is covered, and cook for 15 minutes.
If you want you can let it cool completely after the boiling, but then you’ll need to bake for about 40 minutes (from room temperature) at 180c, with a quick blast of high heat at the end.

This was from theNigella Lawson book “Feast”. I decided to make it for our Easter dinner, because it looked like a fun way to make a ham. It was.

I will warn you that you should take a close look at your biggest pot before you try this one. Mine is huge, and was still a little too small. Next weekend we are going out to a specialty store to buy the biggest pot ever, so that I can make this again someday.

This was easy, and gorgeous. The long time boiling in the sweet fruit juice really cut back the saltiness of the ham in a beautiful way, and the glaze was so good that it was hard not to just eat pieces of fat off the top.

The leftover ham was so good, that I couldn’t bring myself to make anything out of it, I had to just eat it cold with nothing added.

2 comments:

digkv said...

That looks so delicious but what is that fruit thing that you served it with. That looks really good as well.

AteThat said...

It's actually butternut squash. It looks a bit like fruit because it's got a cream sauce on it. Butternut squash is my youngest's favorite. He'll generally eat his, mine, and anybody else's that'll let him. This one didn't realy work out though. He barely touched it.

I was going to blog it, but I ran out of time, then I forgot.

I like it best when it's more simply made.