Christmas Orange Gammon

I love doing this recipe. As I write this, I have 6.5Kg of Gammon soaking in Orange Juice, Water, and Juniper Berries. The post about that one, however, will be in a week or two, as I can’t write about it before it’s cooked!

However, I came across some photos from last Christmas as I was looking, and whilst I don’t have any of it sliced, annoyingly, I have a few of it cooking/cooked:

So, that was around half way cooking. I’ve written about doing this before, but to give you the process again quickly, I’d boiled it in orange juice for a couple of hours, then I took it out, and I’d laid out some string with sliced oranges on top.

I placed the gammon on it, then tied up the strings, and voila – I have a load of orange slices over the gammon ready for roasting.

I roasted it for I think, around another 3-4 hours (I’ll make much more of a note this year!) and basted regularly with the orange juice marinade which also contained a reasonable chunk of brown sugar, and I think honey.

This is how it looked toward the end, before I gave it its final ‘roast’ in the oven to crips up the outside.

As with many posts I do, I wish I’d got more pictures, as I can write and write and write but I like you to see it for yourself.

Anyway as I say, this is a firm favourite recipe of mine – and I’ll detail a lot in the next post which I do about gammon, but the ‘short short version’ is:

1. Let it soak in orange juice for 24 hours
2. Discard that orange juice, and boil in fresh orange juice for another 2-3 hours (depending on size of the gammon)
3. Wrap in orange slices, and roast in the oven on a medium heat (I’d go about Gas Mark 4-5)
4. I used about 1/3 of the orange juice I’d boiled it in, and mixed that with some brown sugar and honey. I let that reduce a bit, then used that to continually base the gammon.
5. Towards the end, I took off the string and let it roast to crisp up the outside a bit. Then let it rest a long time (I actually let it cool, then put it in the fridge for 24 hours).
6. Slice, and enjoy.