Christmas Ham

Christmas Ham Adventure

I call it an adventure, because it is quite a process, taking a while to prepare and cook, leading to a very satisfactory outcome. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to have some culinary fun.

My grandmother always cooked a ham for Christmas. She would order it from her butcher. I'm not sure that she ever used a brine, but perhaps she did. A brine is an old traditional method of preserving the ham, enhancing its tenderness and flavour in the process. Modern hams, bought from the supermarket are injected with a kind of a brine. This method outlined below is easy, but just takes a little time.

I ordered a leg of pork from out market butcher. As it had to be boiled, the limiting factor of the ham was the size - it had to fit in the pot. We bought an 8Kg leg and the butcher removed part of the shank (thick upper leg) and the hock (lower part). We brought it home and realised it was still a bit big, so we cut off a 2kg part of the shank and froze that for another roast. This left us a 6kg ham (Fresh meat, unpreserved, smoked or cooked).

Ingediants

1 Ham - 5 to 6 Kg

1.5Kg Curing Salt

1.5Kg Brown Sugar

5 - 6 Litres Water

Christmas Spices: 1/2 tsp Allspice

1 tsp Cinnamon

1 tsp Powdered Ginger

1 tbsp Black Pepper, Coriander (seeds) &

green pepper and red pepper whole grains

6 Bay leaves.

The leg went into a 10L plastic bag and that went into a big plastic bowl that we had. The bags were pretty good. 24 x 10L bags for about 11€ on Amazon.

I bought curing salt on Amazon too, as you can't get it a the supermarket. The curing salt is Sodium Chloride (NaCl) and contains 0.5 - 0.6% Sodium Nitrite, which gives the ham the nice pink colour we are aiming for. If you don't use this, the pork comes out grey, and less appetising. This was 14 € for 3 Kg salt in 3 x 1 Kg bags. It comes from Poland.

I mixed up a selection of Christmas spices:

Allspice, Cinnamon Ginger, Pepper, Coriander grains, mixed whole grain peppers (green pepper and red pepper), fresh bay leaves.

Brought to a light simmer so the flavours and aromas would be released. Then cooled.

To help dissolve the salt and sugar for the brine, I added the salt and sugar to this pot of spices and water. So 1.5Kg of Curing salt and 1.5 Kg of brown sugar. It didn't all dissolve into this amount of water, so I let it rest a while to cool, then poured the dissolved salt and sugar into the ham bag, and then added more water to the pan to dissolve the rest of the salt and sugar.

Here we see the ham in the bags (I used two bags just in case, but there were no leaks). There is about 5 or 6 litres of water in there with all those spices and of course the curing salt and sugar. The water and spices should not be hot or warm. Add it to the ham cold.

We than refrigerate for 2 days per Kg of ham. So the 6Kg ham needed 12 days of curing. See it in the fridge below:

I turned it over every couple of days to prevent all the spices ending up at the bottom. Not sure if this was required. In this case, the ham needed 12 days of curing, and it should come out of the brine the day before you cool it, for it to soak and rinse. The soaking removes most of the salt. So we ended up keeping this ham in the brine for 11 days, and soaking it the night before cooking, changing the water 3 time in that soaking process, and keeping it in the fridge still while soaking. You wash away the spices and bay leaves etc with the soaking. It turned out, that an extra couple of days in the brine would have been better, more later.

Cooking

Once rinsed, the ham is boiled. Boiling is 20 min per pound or per 450g, so for the 6Kg ham It needed just under 4 and a half hours of boiling. I started at 7am on Christmas Day :-)

You add the ham to the pot, fill with water and bring to the boil. Then discard this water (removing the last salt and some loose fat etc). Add more water to just cover the ham and boil for the total time. I used water from a boiling kettle to help it along. My pot wasn't perfect, and some of the ham stuck out the water, so I had to turn the ham with a couple of forks every hour. This was fine though, as I topped up the water too at this time.

Once boiled, place in a roasting dish, and carefully remove the skin. This is not difficult and can be done with a knife, fork and fingers. You are left with a layer of fat that you can score with a sharp knife in a diamond pattern. See below left.

Cover the fat with a sauce made from a couple of tablespoons Dijon mustard and a jar of chutney (see below right). I use Apricot chutney that we had made earlier this Summer. The sweet chutney balances out the salty pork. Once cooked, you are left with a caramelised crust that adds plenty of flavour to the ham roast. I roasted this 6Kg boiled ham for about 2 hours at around 180° C. Leave it to stand for 20 to 30 min after roasting.

Results and Notes for next time

Overall, we really enjoyed the ham, it tasted amazing.

You need to keep the ham in the brine for 2 days per Kg. So there is a bit of juggling needed to be done at the start. You don't know how much it will weigh, and you want it ready for Christmas. So say you buy a 5Kg ham. That needs 10 days in the brine, and a day to rinse. So you need to buy it on the 14th Dec and brine it immediately. See the photo on the left. The brine makes the meat pink, and there is a patch in the middle that is not pink. This shows that the brine did not get to the middle. We should have kept this ham an extra couple of days in the brine, but because we didn't know how heavy it would be we under-brined it by a few days. No biggie, but note for next time.

You need a good cooking pot for boiling. Get one if you don't have it. We used a 20cm pressure cooker pot without the lid, but I will buy a new pot for the next time we do this. I'll get a 30cm diameter one that is also 30cm tall (25€ on Amazon). I added 5 or 6 refills of boiling water during the boiling to keep the level up.

Roasting was fine, just cover with a bit of foil if you see the top burning. You want it nicely caramelised (browned).

We served with South African style carrots (with brown sugar and cinnamon), mashed potatoes and broccoli.

I made a gravy with the ham juices and some stock. A good fees as an alternative to Christmas Turkey. We'll probably alternate from now on.

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