Cooking ham in a pressure cooker

I’ve always been used to buying pre packed ham. After all, it’s convenient and if you get the taste the difference ranges, it can be pretty tasty. However, for my past few food shops I’ve been buying gammon joints to make and slice my own ham, and boy can you REALLY taste the difference (at no extra cost). So I thought I’d share some of my learning’s thus far!

Saltiness

If you find the ham too salty (I did), soak the ham in water for 3-4 hours before cooking. Some may advise to leave it overnight, but I found this took away too much of the salt and a lot of the flavour too.

Cooking

Cooking a gammon joint in the oven is great, but I wanted to find a quicker way to do it, so I tried the pressure cooker. As a rule of thumb, I cooked the ham for 30 minutes per 1 kg with about one mugs worth of water added. Stabilise the pressure over the high pressure setting and leave to cook.

The ham worked out perfect and needed hardly any time to steam. I found it important to use the high pressure setting in order to ensure the ham is cooked through. Also, timing with a pressure cooker is essential, therefore a few minutes either way can over or under cook the gammon. So make sure you check the joint is cooked through before slicing into ham.

Slicing

As with most meats, it’s important to leave them to rest before eating. Leave the joint to cool for a couple of hours then carve with a folk and serrated knife. Cut the joint as thinly or thickly as you like, but if you’re like me, you’ll be slicing it nice and thick!

Freezing

Finally, cooking a full gammon joint may leave you with more ham than you’d like. It is actually okay to freeze ham once it’s been cooked and sliced. The best way I find to do this is to separate the ham slices into freezer bags, being sure to let it defrost thoroughly when you come to eat it.

Check out my really quick video below on how it's done.

Enjoy, and let me know how you get on,

Cheers!