Projects/Cooking:Home-Cured Ham

So recently I decided to start experimenting with curing my own ham.   Turns out it's actually a pretty simple process and the results are well-worth the time.   All you need is some curing salt.   I just got a bag off amazon.   It's amazing stuff.   It magically transforms plain old pork into magical tasty hammy goodness!   The instructions told me to use it at 5%, so 50g for 1kg of meat, and so on.   I started off small.   Just a modest-sized piece of pork... (Fillet.   Ham is traditionally leg, but anything works)  

...with simple flavourings added to the cure.

This was just brown sugar and cloves mixed in.   Then you take your cure and rub it into the meat, like so...

Then you put it in a sealed plastic bag in the fridge for the week and leave the cure to do its stuff!   All you need to do is drain off any fluid.  Miraculously the cure gets all the way inside the meat, even if it's a large piece, and turns it delicious and hammy!

Then after a week, remove the meat from the fridge and boil it for 1 hour per kilo, then rub it with a glaze (I used soy sauce and maple syrup) and roast it for the same time again.   Job done!   

   Ham post-boiling.   Yes, I know it looks a bit rude...

Ham, glazed and roasted.

And deliciously pink and tasty!

I've found it keeps for about a week in the fridge once it's cooked.   

Soon I got bolder (or maybe greedier) and started using larger bigger pieces of meat...

...and more flavours.

I think this one was garlic, nutmeg, coriander seeds and thyme.   Do be creative, cos it's really amazing how the flavours get into the meat.   The taste is much stronger than with roasts. 

  

Post-curing

And post-roasting!   Sorry about the bad quality phone photo.

So that describes my curing adventures thus far.   I've also tried to do some prosciutto crudo-type stuff, but it hasn't worked very well so far.   I'll keep experimenting and keep you posted.   Also tempted to try bacon in the future too.   

Pecan Meringues

Yes, another baking post already, and yes, this one involves meringue as well.   This is a very simple but very tasty recipe.   So nutty and delicious.   Ingredients are as follows:

4 egg whites
225g sugar
160g ground pecans

Beat the egg white until stiff, fold in the sugar and pecans.   Then put spoonfuls onto a baking sheet and bake for 40 minutes at 120 degrees C.   Et voila!   Easy!  

   

Coconut meringue cake

This is one I'd been wanting to try for a little while.  I used:

125g butter
225g white sugar
3 eggs
125g self raising flour
125g dessicated coconut (plus some extra)
80ml milk

I softened the butter, beat in 125g sugar, separated the eggs and beat in the egg yolks.   I added the milk, flour and...a certain amount of coconut.   The recipe I found didn't have any coconut in the cake mix itself, but I wanted some in there too.  

So, that was the cake mix.   For the meringue topping I whipped the egg whites until stiff, and folded in the remaining 100g sugar.   I then added 125g dessicated coconut.   I thought it looked like quite a lot of coconut for so little meringue and I was right.   The meringue went completely flat and I was worried about whether it was going to come out ok.   But I spooned the cake mix into a cake tin, and carefully put the meringue mix on top of it and baked at 180 degrees.  

The cake came out pretty well.   It was very moist and tasty, and the meringue layer held together ok.  

However, I felt I'd like it better if the meringue on top was more of a meringue and less of a thin coconut crust, so I made a second attempt.   This time, I added the whole 125g coconut to the cake mix and just put a handful on coconut into the meringue mix.   I feel the second attempt worked a lot better!   Tasty, moist coconut cake with a light meringue topping.   Delicious!   Sadly, however, I seem to have failed to take a picture of cake number two.   Sad face.   You'll just have to take my word for it!

Soda Bread

Yes, I know there have been a lot of food-related posts lately.   This is the last one for a while, promise.   Anyway, inspired by my recent to Northern Ireland I decided to try my hand at soda bread.   I used:

300g wholemeal flour
250ml buttermilk
1 tsp salt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

I mixed it altogether and put it in the oven at 200 degrees for 40 minutes.   Simples!   And also yummy!  

 

                               Ok, it doesn't look that tasty.   The photo doesn't do it justice!


One thing I learned though was to NOT bake it on greaseproof paper.   It stuck and wouldn't come off.   Next time I'll put it straight into the loaf tin.   Recommended warm with butter.   Enjoy!  

Baclava!

Yes, another food post.   I love baclava.   Love it, love it, love it!   So I decided to try making the gloriously unhealthy stuff for myself.  

After much deliberation I decided not to make the filo pastry myself.  Usually buying things that I can make myself is kind of against my principles, but in this case I decided to just buy it, as making it from scratch just sounded like a right royal pain.   Here's a shot of my ingredients:

 

I started by unwrapping the filo pastry.   Once it's open this stuff dries out really fast so it's important to work fast, or keep it covered with a damp cloth.   I took half the filo pastry sheets, placing them in a baking tray one at a time, and painting the top of each one with melted butter.   Like so:

Ouch!  My colesterol levels are shooting up just looking at this!   I then added a layer of the chopped nuts mixed with a couple of spoons of sugar, and spices to taste.   Then I added the remaining filo pastry sheets, painted with copius amounts of butter.   That done, I took a sharp knife and cut it up ino bite size pieces.   Next the whole lot went into the oven at 180 degrees for 20 minutes.    I then turned the oven down to 150 degrees and baked for a further 40 minutes.   While it was cooking I made the sugar syrup to pour over the top.   I used 350g sugar, water and a little lemon juice, over a low heat.   When the baclava came out of the oven I poured the syrup over the top and left it overnight to soak in.   Yum yum!

I will definitely be making this again!   But I will be doing things a bit differently.   I really used too many sheets of pastry.   The top couple didn't really to the rest particularly well.   Next time I will only use about 10 sheets per level.   I also want to try making the syrup with honey instead of sugar.   Much more tasty!

Teriyaki beef thing

Here's a successful, though highly flavoured food experiment I thought I'd share with you.   It's a sort of teriyaki beef dish thing.   Ok, so i'm not too sure what to call it.   The point it, it's tasty!   Here's a shot of the ingredients (minus the fresh coriander and the dessicated coconut):

Step one is to marinate the beef in the teriyaki sauce.   I leave it for half a day at least.

        This particular brand of teriyaki sauce is pretty thick, so I added some water to it as well.


Next, chop and fry your onions.   Add the garlic and plenty of ground coriander and dessicated coconut.   And some black pepper.   Chop and add your marinated beef.   Now the trick with this dish is not to overcook it.   You want most of the ingredients to be pretty raw so that they retain their flavour, so wait a while before you add the next indredients, which are the red pepper and the spring onions (both sliced).  Grate a good amount of fresh ginger and juice the lemon and lime.   Add them to taste.   Add the sugar snap peas and soy sauce to taste.   Turn off the heat and add sesame oil to taste and lots of fresh coriander leaves.   Yum yum!   Serve with egg noodles.

                                                           Look at all the colours!

Butter!

Tonight's project was to change my gear cable.   Tonight's project failed.   Couldn't get the screw undone.   So I thought I'd tell you about a project I did quite a while ago, but have repeated a couple of times since.   Home made butter!   This seemed to be a fairly unusual project.   Most people I know don't seem to have a clue how to make butter, and very few have tried it.   So I was quite surprised at how easy it was and how well it turned out.   All you need is cream and an electric whisk.

 I used 600ml of double cream, and just started whisking.   It whipped up pretty quickly.   I then carried on whisking for a quite a long time.   My cream started getting grainier and grainier and harder to whisk.   It turned into quite a messy project!   I got butter splats all in my hair and up the walls (the second time I did this I put the mixing bowl into a box first).   What fun!   Suddenly liquid started to appear in the bottom of the my mixing bowl.   Buttermilk!   I put the butter into a sieve and let the buttermilk drain off.   I filled the mixing bowl with cold water and kneaded the butter in the cold water to remove as much buttermilk as I could and to stick all the individual grains together.   Finally I kneaded half a tea spoon of salt into the butter to preserve it, and then shaped it, using a butter dish as a mould.   The home made butter was delicious!   So fresh and creamy.   Much nicer than any shop bought butter.   It kept pretty well too!   It was quite streaky though.   Clearly my whisk is not as good at removing buttermilk than industrial machines.   Ah well.   A future project will have to be to use home made butter in baking!

  

Homemade Hummus

This is something I'd been wanting to make for a while.   Up til now I'd always got as far as cooking the chick-peas, adding the other ingredients...and eating them.   Back in the mists of time before I had a blender I think I once try mashing them with a fork.   It didn't really work.   SO for my hummus you will need...a certain amount of dried chick peas, soaked overnight, good quality olive oil, lemon juice, plenty of garlic, sesame oil, salt, pepper and a bit of water.   Yes, I know you're meant to use tahini, but what would I ever use it for again.   So I substituted sesame oil in there instead and it seemed to do the job.  :)  

                                                              soaked chick peas

a lime sneaked in there as well as it was left over from the weekend's cooking project.  


Boil the chick peas for...a certain amount of time until they're done.   Add some olive oil and lemon (plus lime) juice and blend.   The blending process wasn't as easy as I'd thought it would be.   I had to add some water to the mixture to help it along, but I got there.   Add all the other ingredients to taste.   Serve with lots of crunchy veg.   Delicious! 

The amount of chick peas I used made a whole cereal bowl full up the top of hummus, so I put half of it in the freezer.  It seems to freeze and thaw very well.  Enjoy!