HOT HONEY HAM & A SEARED SPROUT SALAD
Boxing day's cornerstones, done well.
Morning all!
Happy Friday everyone, and welcome back to another issue of How I Cook+. Thanks so much for being here and supporting my work. It means the world.
On the menu this week is my Christmas ham, using the one and only Dr. Sting’s Hot Honey. We’ve also got a lovely little sprout recipe with smoked bacon, mustard and apple.
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Cheers,
B x
I had dinner with my good friend Jordon Ezra King last night, and we were chatting about how the only moment in the calendar that us Brits hold with any culinary significance is right about now. Christmas. We roll out the red carpet for roasted turkey, tureens of carb-laden bread sauce, roasted gammon, boiled sprouts and brandy soaked fruit puddings. These dishes are then stuffed back into our Grandmother’s recipe book until next year. The Italians and French commit to this level of culinary pride every single day, and we reserve it for one very special time of year. It’s a funny thing to do.
So many Christmas foods are utterly delicious and ought to be enjoyed throughout the autumn and winter seasons. So why do we gatekeep them until Jesus day? Perhaps they feel even more special when enjoyed so seldomly. The ritual of attempting (and often clumsily failing) to cook a menu that you never, ever get to practice in a little paper hat feels part and parcel with the “big day”. The chaos, the pressure, the forgotten turkey, I don’t think we’d have it any other way.
How to soften the blow of cooking these seldom made dishes? Enter the Christmas recipe.
Christmas recipes dominate the food media space at this time of year. They’re never too zany or out there. The trick with a good Christmas recipe is to write one that feels close enough to tradition that people aren’t scared off, but offers a subtle difference, something that sets it apart from the crowd and your nan’s boiled gammon and parsley sauce.
This is my Christmas ham, and it uses hot honey and pomegranate molasses (How modern! How zany!). It’s also rather delicious.
Leftovers are as important a tradition to Christmas as Santa Claus and for me, roasting a big fat ham (far too big for the crowd you’re feeding) is the best way to generate such leftovers. Wrap up the leftover ham and stick it in the fridge ready to carve up and eat with english mustard and sh*t white bread over the coming days. Yum.
What is gammon?
For those who don’t know, I spent a short 7 months working in a butcher’s shop during lockdown #1. With restaurant’s doors firmly locked and no sign of let up, I took the advice of my ex-head chef in Melbourne and knocked on the door of the local butchers, asking for work.
It was on a pig farm, practiced whole animal butchery, and was a complete joy. You learn a lot working in a butchers shop; how to make sausages (thousands of the things), charcuterie, how to make traditional English bacon, how to debone a pig’s head, break down a hind quarter of beef, stuff and truss a chicken and of course; how to make gammon. I made hundred of gammon across those 7 months, all in the build up to Christmas at the shop. A frenzy of wool wrapped shoppers clawing at the display securing their boxing day ham.
Gammon is the hind leg of a pig that has been cured/salted in a similar fashion to bacon. If it hasn’t gone through this process, well, it’s still just a pork leg. Like bacon, you need to cook gammon, and once it’s cooked, it becomes ham! The curing process preserves the gammon and seasons it beautifully.
Bone-in or bone-out?
Gammon is usually sold bone-out, but you can procure a bone-in gammon joint if you really want to. I personally don’t think the bone offers anything to a Gammon joint. Some argue it helps to keep the meat juicy and adds flavour, but for me, the curing process injects so much moisture and flavour into the meat that the bone becomes surplus to requirement. It can make a dramatic centerpiece to have a Flintstone-esque bone protruding from your glazed ham, but it ain’t worth the faff. Go for boneless.
A bone-out gammon will need to be trussed. A bit like a block of halloumi, the pork leg will have a natural seam where your butcher (maybe it was me?) has removed the leg bone. Trussing the joint (aka. tying it up), closes these gaps, giving a uniform shape and encouraging an even cook. during the cooking process, you’ll need to remove the skin and score the ham. To do so means breaking the string that your butcher has lovingly tied around the joint. This might mean that the pork “unwraps” itself a little. If you have some butchers/kitchen string knocking around (I know not everyone does, so no sweat if not) tie the pork back up as best you can once you’ve whipped off the skin.
Smoked vs unsmoked
This is completely up to you, and I will flit between the two as both are delightful. I usually base my choice on how much of the ham I plan to eat in one go. If I know that the whole ham will be consumed while hot, I will probably go for unsmoked. Smoked gammon is definitely the punchier of the two, and can result in a little palette fatigue when eaten hot from the oven (that is, smoky overload), but is sensational as leftovers. If I know that I’m going to enjoy most of the ham the next day, I'll pick smoked.
Glaze formula
