Ginger Glazed Ham with Smoked Mac and Cheese:
This has become our traditional meal on Christmas eve and until this year was always cooked in the oven. This year it made the journey to the BBQ and a great dish was improved further!
The recipe is by Nigella and is in her Christmas cookbook but can also be found online: https://www.nigella.com/recipes/ginger-glazed-ham
I ordered an Old Spot Whole Gammon from Martin’s Meats and it was about 4kg in weight: http://martinsmeats.com/shop/old-spot-whole-gammon/
The recipe is quite simple as you boil the gammon in a pan that you pour 6 litres of dry ginger ale into! After 3 1/2 hours simmering in the pan (aim for about 70c) you remove the gammon from the pan and make a glaze of ginger preserve, English mustard, ground cloves and soft, dark brown sugar. Cut away the layer of skin on the gammon and score the surface (recipe says not to but I prefer it!) then slap the glaze all over the gammon.
I cooked this indirectly in the bbq over Oxford Charcoal Wild Cherry with a chunk of Oak and a few chunks of Cherry. It didn’t need long in the bbq, around 30 minutes. Just long enough to get some colour on the glaze and some smoke into the meat.
You can see from the photo below the glaze and smoke gave the meat some great colour.
The meat for dinner was carved off by hand and the leftovers went on the meat slicer the next day.
A great dish to have with the Gammon is your favourite Mac and Cheese recipe but cook it in the BBQ or Smoker with a few Oak wood chunks in there. The colour you get on the cheese and the smokey taste is incredible.
This recipe was Nigella’s Mac and Cheese De-Luxe which is in the Christmas book but is also online again: http://blueskyandbunting.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/macaroni-cheese-de-luxe.html – Just as a slight tweak we add a bit of ground nutmeg. This one went in the BBQ for 45 minutes as the Gammon was cooking. Previous runs have gone in the smoker for a couple of hours, it’s a great dish to cook to make use of a spare shelf in the smoker. We normally have a load vac packed in the freezer for emergency lunches!