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Welcome to French Food
Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food
and because I live in rural I hope you enjoy my ramblings about rural France!
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This is our village. Our house is the white one at the top right. |
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Hamming it up!
No, I'm not becoming an actor. What I am doing is
attempting to do a ham the English way. My wife loves what she calls
gammon which is a particularly English way of preparing ham. We were
talking about how nice it would be to have ham to go with our turkey this
Thanksgiving. We discussed various possibilities of how to get an
'English' ham, but hadn't really come up with an answer. I was about to
call Sara, our wonderful turkey supplier and ace winemaker, to order a
second turkey seeing as how we now have 24 people coming for Thanksgiving
on the 22ond of November. (We do Thanksgiving a bit early since it isn't a
holiday at all in France) Anyway, we went to the supermarket and low & behold they were having a pork sale. I bought a whole shoulder for a ridiculously low price and we decided to have a go at doing the 'English Ham'. First thing I called my friend Rob who used to own a butcher shop. He came up and dismembered the ham shoulder. We ended up with one 6 kilo piece and a smaller 3 kilo piece plus Rob cut the skin off for making crackling. Having done that we needed to find a recipe on how to do the ham.
So, there's the ham now the recipe. We eventually found it in a cookbook called the "River Cottage Cookbook". We knew that to make a baked ham in the English style you first had to brine it; the question was in what? How much salt? Well we found a recipe in this book after much fruitless searching on the Internet. Turns out that it an apples cider cure. Here's the recipe: Cider Brine Mix
All you do is mix all these ingredients together then bring them to a boil stirring occasionally. Let them cool fully before adding the pork. As you can see that's a lot of liquid AND it has to be kept at near freezing. Here's our answer to that problem:
The plastic bucket. We had to make sure first of all that it would fit into the little fridge and that the ham would fit into it. Fortunately both did fit; the bucket into the fridge and the ham into the bucket.
Note that we've weighed the ham down with a pot lid to keep it submerged. We'll give it a stir or two every day. The fridge is turned to it's coldest so should be OK. Now we have to wait until November 20th. This is just on the minimum time recommended for bring pork of this size. We should be OK on that. I'll try to do a couple of progress reports in the mean time, but there won't be much action other than stirring until the pork comes out of the brine.
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Here are the pots full of brine cooling ourside. THis took a while.
