A friend bought a 13 lb country ham for me, since I said I would cook it if he bought it.
Well. What’s a good (preferably not too sweet, but mildly sweet is ok) way to cook it? Since it was pretty expensive, I don’t want to ruin it. I looked up the Good Eats show on ham, but I find many of his recipes aren’t really to my taste, especialy those for meat.
Are you quite sure it hasn’t already been cooked? If it’s a real country ham, straight from the curing house, this is what you have to do, and it takes a long time.
Scrub the ham well under cool running water to remove any cure, coating or mold (Mold is a natural process of the curing and is no cause for alarm). Put the ham in a container large enough to hold it, and cover it with cool water. Put it in a cool place where critters can’t get to it and let it soak for three days, changing the water each day. You need to do this to remove some of the salt and rehydrate the ham.
Once it’s been soaked, put it in a large pot with enough water to cover it, and gradually bring the water to a very slow simmer. Cover the pot and adjust the heat so that the water percolates just below a simmer. Check the temperature during the first 20 minutes, to regulate the cooking speed, and then every hour afterward. You don’t want it to cook too fast. It will take 4-5 hours to cook. You’ll know it’s done when the top skin becomes covered with big blisters. Once this has happened, uncover the pot, remove it from the heat, and let it cool. Pour off the water and transfer it to a sheet pan or a platter. It can be eaten as it, or it can then be baked. (Country ham cooked in this manner will keep in the refrigerator for two months or more.)
Now if you want to bake it, try the following:
Put the fully cooked and trimmed ham on a roasting rack in a heavy roasting pan. Dot the the surface with three tablesppons of butter that’s been cut into small pieces. Pour a bottle of good quality Madeira into the pan, and grate fresh nutmeg generously over the ham.
Put it into a preheated 350 degree oven, and after a half hour, begin basting it every fifteen minutes, and cook it for an hour longer, until the ham is well caramelized and the fat is blistered. Watch out near the end, because the sugar in the Madeira will concentrate and the ham will begin to glaze quickly. Take care not to burn it.
You can serve it warm, cold, or at room temperature. If you’re going to serve it warm, skim all the fat from the roasting pan, then serve the pan juices as a sauce. It’s delicious! Let the ham cool 15-20 minutes before carving it. Carve it beginning at the hock end, and proceed toward the front of the ham.
Good luck - you’re in for a treat. This is a hell of a lot of work, but it’s worth it!
It’s in a mesh bag, it was not refrigerated, and it has ‘country ham’ on the label.
This would be the type you’re talking about, Labdad, right?
Well, country hams - whether cured in Smithfield, Virginia or elsewhere - are almost always available either cooked or uncooked. Read the label closely; that should tell you. Or just ask your friend to ask the place he got it from.
But if you’ve got an uncooked ham, you will have to soak and boil it first before baking it.
Incidentally, I left a step out in the above: trimming. That takes place after the boiling, but before the baking. Use a good sharp knife to remove the skin and all but a thin (1/4 inch or so) layer of the fat.
Don’t cook it whole. Slice it and fry it up. Much better that way. Fry some eggs…make some grits…red eye gravy if you feel like it.
Best breakfast in the world.
If I may add a suggestion to Labdad’s excellent description of how to bake a country ham-use some sorghum for a very tasty old-fashioned glaze. Once the ham has baked sufficiently, take it out of the oven, cut off the skin and most of the fat (you need a thin layer on top), cut shallow lines in a grid pattern through the fat layer and brush on a goodly amount of sorghum. Slip it back into the oven and bake until the sorghum bubbles into a nice glaze. The sweetness of the sorghum really complements the salty ham. I make this for Christmas every year and my family raves about it.
Oh, I should add that I usually skip boiling the ham and just go straight from soaking (three days minimum) to baking and have always had good results.
Don’t cook it at all. Many American country hams can be eaten raw. Give the producer a ring if you are unsure. I read about this in this NYT article, but unfortunately it’s gone pay. The gist of it was that whilst they all say you have to cook 'em, often you don’t.