Baked Ham
A baked ham is a great centrepiece to any roast dinner. On top of being delicious, it keeps well and is very reusable, and will feed a lot of people without much effort. Most of the cooking is done when you boil it the night before, so it's a good choice if you're balancing a lot of dishes and won't have much oven time.
You'll need
- A big pot (as big as your ham)
- A metal oven tray
- A sharp knife
- A colander
Ingredients
- A gammon ham, smoked or unsmoked.
- Some soft honey and mustard
- An onion, a carrot, and a few cloves of garlic.
Method
The night before:
- Put enough water into the pot that the gammon will be covered when it goes in. (You can test this by putting the gammon in, filling with water, then removing the gammon.)
Bring the water to the boil, and then carefully add the gammon, being sure not to splash yourself.- Bring the water back to the boil, and then turn the heat down to simmer it for twenty minutes per 450g of gammon.
After the gammon is boiled, pour the water away and put the gammon on a plate. Let it cool and then put it in the fridge overnight.
On the day:
- Preheat the oven to 190C or gas 6.
Peel the skin off of the gammon, leaving the layer of fluffy white fat underneath. If your ham came in an elastic net, now is the time to remove it.
With a sharp knife, score the fat into diamonds about an inch wide.
Mix a spoonful of mustard and a spoonful of honey in a glass to create a glaze. Spread this onto the fat on the ham.- Peel the onion, and roughly chop it and the carrot into pieces about an inch wide. Don't worry too much about making them nice.
Throw the chopped veg and the garlic into the oven tray; you don't need to peel the garlic. It's just there for the ham to sit on -- this is called a trivet.- 45 minutes before you are due to serve, put the gammon on the trivet and put the tray into the oven.
15 minutes before you are due to serve, take the tray out again. Put the cooked gammon onto a separate dish, cover it in tinfoil and then place a teatowel over it to keep the heat in.
Now you are going to make gravy with the roast onion, carrot, garlic, and the juices from the gammon, including the sticky run-off glaze. Add a glass of water or wine to the baking tray and loosen the vegetables with a wooden spoon -- they will probably have stuck to the tray a little. 
Place the baking tray on a hob and turn the heat up -- this will heat the liquid in it and transfer the lovely charred onion flavour to the liquid. Hold the tray with an oven glove and use the wooden spoon to rub any sticky slightly-burned bits from the tray until they loosen.- Once nothing's sticking to the tray, use the spoon (or a potato masher, if you like) to mash the onions and carrot into the gravy.
- Strain the gravy into a pot with the colander, and throw the vegetables away.
If the gravy needs thickening at this point, mix a teaspoon or two of cornflour with water in a tumbler, and add it to the stock -- it will now thicken beautifully. When it's ready, pour into a jug for serving along with your ham.
Serve!
Variations
- It should go without saying that if you're making this you should also roast some potatoes as a side.
- You can add all sorts of things to the ham while it boils. I've seen people add cloves, garlic, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, peppercorns, carrot, onions... I'm honestly not sure if any of it has much of an effect.
- If you want to look like a big fancy chef, you can poke cloves into the fat of the ham, in the corners of the diamonds you scored. Again, they don't add much to the flavour (and your guests will need to pick them out when they eat the ham), but they do look really cool.
- You might be tempted to save the water you boiled the ham in for stock. Don't do this! It'll be much saltier than stock water. I tried using it as a base for a risotto once and it was inedible. Maybe there's a use for it somewhere -- I hate wasting any part of my food -- but I don't know what it is.