One thing you should know about me is that I (obviously) come from a great family and there’s none more brilliant and inventive than my little brother. OK, so he’s not so little anymore and has family of his own now but I still think of him as my little brother.
He came up with this recipe and it has rocketed straight into the family collection of favourites. It is, in essence, loosely based on Nigella’s Ham in Coca Cola, from her book, “Nigella Bites”. In it Nigella cooks the ham in Coke then glazes it with black treacle and cloves. Problem is. we don’t really like Coke, cloves or treacle.
We do, however, absolutely adore ginger beer. So….. first get some gammon
I always rinse the gammon because you never know how much salt has been added, and, quite frankly, if I just wanted to just taste a salted ham, well, I wouldn’t go to all this bother, would I?
You’ll see a salty, fatty sort of scum on the water and then you’ll be glad you did it. Anyway, you want it to taste of ginger beer….lovely Old Jamaica Ginger Beer
You need to make sure there’s no plastic round the rolled joint – cut it off before you put the ham in the pan
Then.. into the pan with it, and pour that lovely ginger beer over it. I slice the skin off some ginger root and add that as well to give it an extra gingery boost. I’ll be using the peeled ginger later in the glaze.
Lid on, heat up and bring it to a boil. Then, let it simmer gently for an hour and a half or so, gently bubbling away with the ginger beer infusing the gammon. Prod it with a sharp knife to see if it has some give to it. The actual simmering time depends on the size of the gammon so just check it now and then till you know it is done.
Get it out and put it on the board. Don’t throw the ginger beer out, you’ll need some of it later. Put the oven on now to get hot – 200 degrees or thereabouts.
You can see that it is beautifully cooked and that all it needs now is a lovely glaze
Carefully remove the rind, making sure you leave some of the fat on
Score the fat in with a criss cross fashion and then smear a thin coating of mustard over it… just a thin coating, that’s all you need
Remember you peeled the ginger? Grate that and smear that over the mustardy coating
Then coat the whole lot with sugar
Put it in a baking tin that you have lined either with tinfoil or a silicon sheet (this saves you hours of scrubbing afterwards) and add some of the ginger beer simmering liquid. Not much, maybe just enough to keep the base of the ham wet. This keeps the ham moist as you roast it on a relatively high heat to glaze it beautifully.
After about ten minutes the sugar has melted and bubbled and gone beautifully brown and you have….
Deeeeeeeelicious! Thanks Lil’ Brother!
Try it. It’s good, honest.