Over the top Ham! – Don’t waste an opportunity!

Over the top Ham! – Don’t waste an opportunity!

The opportunity for little innovations are part of the pleasure of cooking for me!  This weekend produced a perfect example.  We were doing a slow cooked Pork and Pulled Pork Ragù (more of that later) and we also had a small cured ham to prepare for the following weekend.  When cooking a gammon to make ham I normally do this over a container to collect all those lovely cooking juices from the developing ham, so they can be used later.  Sometimes, especially if not enough water has been added to the collection tray – the juices can burn and spoil.   This time however we sat the developing ham on a grill that in turn sat on the Dutch Oven containing the ragù.  This was in just  the same way as you place the meat when you cook ‘over the top’ chilli – see here.

The meat juices simply dripped from the ‘Over the Top Ham” directly into the developing sauce!  The only difference this made to the cooking of the ragù was that the addition of some of the stock and the salt and pepper was delayed till near the end of the cook so the final taste could be balanced appropriately after the addition of the cooking juices from the ham

And finishing off the Ham?  Well, as the ragù was cooking at 135C, once the Ham was approaching the desired internal temperature, it was removed from the EGG coated in sweet Bavarian mustard and finished off for 10 mins in a hot domestic oven at 180C – simple!

 



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.