What exactly is a Christmas ham and what's the best way to cook it?

Wet sloppy nightmare or artisan luxury bliss. If you plan to buy a Christmas ham this year here's a few pointers

Firstly what exactly is a ham?

A ham is hind leg of a pig from the femur to the hock. The word gammon derives from the Old Northern French word jambe for hind-leg, and gammon may also be used to refer to a ham or bacon. The depth of meat to the bone is greatest at the top of the hind limb; cutting this piece away from the bone and curing it separately does the job thoroughly and easily. This cut is the original and to this extent authentic form of gammon, though the name is often applied to any round ham steak. Gammon is usually smoked.

What is a free range ham?

Organic ham implies that the pigs are reared in a free range way but there are also many free range producers who don’t feed organic feed and therefore just sell “Free range” pork. New guidelines have been drawn up between the Irish free range producers pig group and Bord Bia and a mark will soon be available to consumers. The prices for free range will generally be higher but believe me, it does taste more flavoursome.

So you’re out rushing around for your Christmas food shop. Why is it important to look at where the ham is from?

Finely sliced ham

Imported European hams have more water and nitrite content allowed. Dutch processors can put up to 17% brine into their meat but only about 10% is allowable here. So an imported ham or packet of rashers that cook down to half their size mightn’t be worth the cheaper price on the supermarket shelf. In the USA a new study in the US found 69 percent of raw pork samples tested positive for yersina a lesser known but serious foodborne pathogen. Countries with less strict food regimes than ours are not worth buying cheap meat from.  

What goes into a ham?

Wet-cured bacon is prepared by immersing sides of bacon in brine or by injecting brine into the meat. It’s popular with manufacturers as it’s a faster and cheaper way to cure, but it has downsides for flavour. The final product is allowed to have up to 10% brine by weight, leading to shrinking on the pan. When you see a white liquid come from your rashers, that’s the brine and is a sign they have been wet cured.

You should be able see the grain of the muscle 

By contrast, dry-cured bacon is rubbed with a mixture of salt and sugar in various proportions and they are given time to cure the meat, taking about 7 days. Some producers will say there really is no such thing as nitrate free ham has pork can only be cured with nitrate. (Some use dried celery extract which has high concentrations of nitrate).  It’s a slower and more labour intensive process but it results in a drier finish and fuller, more pronounced flavour. This is the way meat was cured prior to it becoming an industrial process. You’ll benefit not just from a much better taste, but because there will be less shrinkage during cooking and it is easier to get a nice crisp result.

What’s the best way to cook it?

Choose the right sized ham e.g. a 4kg fillet of ham will feed 10 people and allows a little extra if your family like to help themselves to more on Christmas night. Never!!

Cook the ham on Christmas eve – it takes the pressure off the next day

Weigh the ham and put in a pot with half water and pure apple juice if you have it or a bay leaf, bouquet garni, orange peel or cider

Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes per pound. Some people change this water or soak the ham then fully roast it. If its dry cured it doesn’t need soaking.

Honey and spice glazed ham

Next day, remove skin and score the meat crossways with a sharp knife. Apply your preferred glaze. Honey, mixed spices with cinnamon and cardamon is one of my favourites. A lot of people will put cloves in the ham, a jerk or Caribbean glaze is gorgeous but seriously hot.

You can warm the ham before putting on the glaze. Apply the glaze and put it back in the oven for another 20/30 minutes. (This can all be done while your turkey is resting.)

Do not throw the cooking water out. It can be used to keep the ham moist when roasting in the oven. 

All important - what price should you pay?

Supermarkets –

Lidl have hams from 4.99 a kilo to 7.99 a kilo a gammon and a loin, Irish produced

Dunnes stores cooked ham 4 kilos Bord Bia 50 euro (12.50 a kilo)

Dunnes Stores Dry cured Irish gammon joint 1.9 kilos 19.99 euro

Free range/small producers

www.crowesfarm.ie - outdoor reared dry cure hams and organic dry cure hams, both boneless.

Their Outdoor Reared hams are €9 per kg and the organic are €12.99 per Kg.

Can courier direct to your door, final courier delivery day for Christmas is Dec 22nd and courier is free for orders over €100, below that it's €10..

www.Termonfeckindelicious.ie (I so love that name) – dry cured 13lb (nearly 6 kilos) boneless ham 45 euro. Whole ham on the bone 40 euroBottom of Form

www.Jack McCarthy.ie award winning Kanturk butcher 4 kilos free range boned –

34 euro

www.oldfarm.ie  €14.50 per kg, free-range, gmo free, natural brine cure.  Delivered to your door!

Here's a link to a radio piece I did with Pat Kenny this week on ham (its an hour and 6 mins into the show) and whatever you do, eat plenty of ham this Christmas. 

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/todaywithpatkenny/2012-12-06.html 

Women in agriculture? We could learn a lot from the tech sector

Two pieces of short news - I was contacted today with news that Olhausen the pigmeat processors and makers of the very popular Olhausen sausage are in talks with a buyer to save the company. While listening to tales of misery and woe on RTE's Liveline, this was a lovely piece of news to recieve. Hopefully a sale will come to pass for the 160 workers and an established Irish brand with a popular, longstanding reputation.

Tomorrow I am delighted to be MC at the Georgina Campbell Irish Food Guide awards with Bord Bia in Dublin. While no relation to Georgina, we must have some deep genetic connection as we both love good food. I've seen a run down of the award winners tonight and it's great to see some new establishments making their way into the frame and from parts of the country that we might have passed over as having a vibrant or high-achieving food culture. I'm delighted to be part of it and all of the award winners (24 in total) have really achieved the top level in their field. Being selected by Georgina for her stamp of approval marks them out as quality, authentic businesses whether they are a rural B&B or a Michelin starred chef.

Later in the week I'll wearing my reporting hat again for RTE from the Dublin Web Summit. Ireland is at the centre of a vibrant tech sector which along with agriculture is one of our indigenous success stories. Of particular interest at this years summit is its focus on women in business and looking at why tech has many female CEOs (globally) than many other sectors. On Thursday I'll be at the Leaders Lunch (pictured right) talking to Anne Heraty CEO of CPL, Sonia Flynn, director of user operations at Facebook, and Pay Pal's vice president of global operations Louise Phelan. This are big hitters in the

tech scene and it's wonderful to see the leadership they provide to others wanting to enter tech. Gender balance is something pertinent to agriculture which for many years was a very male dominated sector. I wrote about this recently in relation to large animal vets in Ireland and how women were now commonplace calving heifers on farms and wrestling animals into crushes. Outside factors have changed the balance in veterinary, largely due to the amount of females in the degree course. It will be interesting to see how the many female entrants into Ag Science and take up roles in agri-business and influence the standing of women in the food and farming sector. We know they are present in huge numbers in terms of food businesses and especially artisan food, but on farms actually in charge of the business the numbers are smaller, mostly due to traditional patterns of inheritance and land ownership. For example a woman has never won Macra/FBD young farmer of the year award. Four reached the finals last year, the highest number ever. Let's hope we see a woman take home the top prize soon, or a women at the top of some of our agri-business giants. In my experience when I research or interview ag voices in Ireland I am often surprised to find a woman on the end of the phone, whether it be on a research facility or a farm. One very able female food producer/farmer said to me recently she wanted her son to do the interview as she didn't think she could do justice to their business talking about it. Despite my encouraging she wasn't for turning, and I interviewed her son. As Nora Ephron used to say, women are often their own worst enemies. We need to take a leaf from the tech sector, get out there, get visible and get to the top. 

Pigs glorious pigs

This week in the Irish Farmers Journal I'm writing about the pig sector and the precarious position it is currently in because of the huge rise in animal feed prices. It was chilling to talk to farmers who are losing up to 10,000 euro a week on their farm. It's a crazy figure, the type of stuff that would not only keep you awake at night but encourage you to sell up and get out before you lose your mind. With feed prices pushing cost of production above what farmers are getting per finished animal, that's what the losses are -  10 euro a week per pig on a 600 sow unit is 10,000 a week. Put another way, half a million euros per year.

New's today that meat processing company Olhausen is to close three plants in Dublin and Monaghan with the loss of 160 jobs makes the crisis all more pertinent. Olhausen was an old Irish business and such was the popularity of their sausages they were even shipped over to James Joyce in Zurich. Unfortunately it looks like the firm will be wound up, another casualty of a very tough pigmeat trading environment which has put processors also under massive pressure. There has been some movement recently (and thankfully) on the supermarkets front in offering a bit more on price but as pigmeat is increasingly seen and sold as a discount meat, pig farmers are still in a volatile position. As long as rashers are sold on "two for one" offers and priced as a loss leader to shift other groceries that situation is going to remain. The only light at the end of the tunnel is that pig producers across Europe are leaving the sector, partly because of the upcoming legislation bringing in changes to the housing of sows.

Up to now, female pigs have been in stalls to prevent bullying and allow for even feeding. Animal welfare improvements now mean they will be loose housed in groups - but for farmers here that means an average investment of 300,000 euro to change their systems around. Across the EU pig producer numbers are decreasing and decreased supply should mean a rise in price. Without it, we won't see the 400 or so farmers in the Irish pig sector here next year.

My last piece for the Farmers Journal on the large-animal vet sector is now available online at the link below. My food column this month in The Irish Times Gloss magazine is unfortunately not online but I'll put a copy of it soon on Basketcase. If you like eating and well sourced Irish food it's an entertaining read, with plenty of gossip and upcoming food events thrown in.

http://www.farmersjournal.ie/site/farming-Prevention-and-cure-15654.html

Organic champions, and going back to our roots

I was delighted to be a judge at this year's Bord Bia National Organic Awards. After all, spending
a day eating and drinking fine food and drink... me? Never...

What was particularly interesting in sampling and examining all the shortlisted entries was the development that the organic sector has experienced in the last ten years; it really has been phenomenal. Yes it's only a small part of the national grocery spend, but as a sector it has developed large successful brands like Glenisk and also promoted Irish artisan food businesses in general.

When I was a producer on Ear to the Ground in the late 1990s I remember an editorial meeting about an organic cheese story we were planning to shoot. We vacillated over the decision as we felt for a farming programme organics were considered niche and outside the box. The situation is totally different today. We know that the marketplace for organic food in Ireland is worth 104 million euros annually. In Germany one in every five euros spent on food is spent on organics. There's no reason why we can't grow our domestic demand and also our share of export product in Germany with the expertise and development farmers and producers here have built over the past decade and more.

Crowes Farm (pictured above and below) won the overall award for their dry-cure rashers. The Crowe family have been farming in Tipperary for over a hundred years and switched over to organic certification in 2007. They now rear and butcher their own pigs (TJ is the butcher in the family) and their short listed rashers were pretty outstanding. We felt this product really deserved the overall award as it just had great eating quality. As it's low in salt and added water it didn't leave the customary mess when cooked. It tasted of good quality pork, not nitrates. Imported bacon which is a problem for Irish pig producers has even

higher levels of added water and nitrate than is allowable in bacon processing in Ireland. So many consumers are eating something which doesn't resemble any type of pig meat but a white mess on the pan, and has shrunk to one third of its pre-cooked size.

That's why Crowe's bacon impressed; it looked and tasted great. The packaging was also simple but contemporary. Many of the products we judged had too much or too little information on the labelling and while I know it's something that's difficult to get right, it's really important for the consumer who pulls that product down from the shelf. I chatted to TJ after the awards ceremony and when I complimented him on the labeling he said it had taken months with the designers to get right. Goes to show hard work pays off.

While there were plenty of unusual foods short listed in the awards we felt as judges that some of the most notable were traditional Irish foodstuffs - Crowe's bacon, Pat Lawlor's porridge oats (pictured right) and Keogh's potatoes; all of whom also won their category. It chimes with where we are economically that the foods we are turning to and interested in again are far from complicated and Irish to the core. If it's a sign we're going back to basics then that can only be a good thing.

Congratulations to all the shortlisted entries and award winners, the quality of everything we judged shows a vibrant organic sector which in uncertain times, is still ploughing ahead offering great food, great food stories and food on the plate that you really want to eat.

Would you bet on the price of food if eventually it made you poorer?

Great to read today that Barclays have made £500 million this year from betting on food prices, a practice that has been labelled by observers as "immoral" and "lacking a moral compass". Betting on commodity prices is a major part of the financial trading markets and unfortunately results in making food more expensive for the rest of us.

In the developing world, it can result in even more people starving than at present, and creates uncertainty and pressure on food supplies globally. In Ireland, the hangover from drought in the US, rising grain prices combined with speculative profiteering by commodity traders has had it's own effects. According to the Irish Farmer's Association one third of Irish pig farmers are now close to hitting the wall.

Betting on food prices is a huge driver in the cost of the food, and banks, hedge funds and the like don't give a whit about its knock on effects. In 2008, the exorbitant rise of food prices caused public disorder throughout the developing world and particularly in North Africa. This movement about hunger essentially, and lack of fairness in the food distribution system extended into human rights and became the Arab spring. It felled Colonel Gadaffi in Libya and began the struggle for equality that has lead to the terrible bloodshed now happening in Syria.

I travelled to Lebanon and Syria a few years ago with my husband, not as journalists but as a curious people seeking an inside track on what was going on in these fascinating countries. When I think now of the gorgeous people we stayed with it gives me shivers to think where they might be now. The retired academic who ran a small B and B in Aleppo with a library full of French and English literature and Roman walls propping up the basement. On a rooftop terrace we looked across the dusky skyline of one of the world's most beautiful cities, talked about the Assad regime and how on earth they were going to get rid of him. This fantastic man is surely fled from Syria by now, or else he is dead.

The price of food has always been a driver in political and social change. Land and the resources to grow food on are the primary reason countries go to war. Now more than ever the pressure on fragile world resources in the food chain needs serious attention. We also need to be cogent of a food ownership and distribution system that is deeply inequitable and flawed. Irish farmers are suffering at present as they rely on imported grain and soya to feed livestock and the price of this food has risen to almost twice it's value since the start of this year.

Pigs and poultry who are indoor animals (in the coventional systems) are wholly dependent on cereal food. They are also suffering in the face of cheap imports from the EU and further afield. All of us like a bargain and we're also grocery shopping in more lean times, but asking food producers to grow livestock below the cost of production is something that shouldn't be occurring. On RTE Countrywide on Saturday I joined presenter Damien O'Reilly in examining how critical this problem is. We asked why no mechanism so far seems to able to get the food chain under control and limit its volatility and that knock on effect on farmers and consumers.

Check it out at the link below and ask yourself, is cheap food really the way to go? For all our sakes.

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/countrywide/

The pig kids

Ah, pigs and teenagers. Two words that probably occur in the same sentence more often than we'd like to admit. The state of my teenage bedroom drove my parents into a apoplectic frenzy. But I'm much tidier now, I swear.
These two lads - Patrick and Hugh McInerney are some of the most enterprising teenagers you're ever going to meet. From their house in Kilkenny they run a business breeding and selling rare breed pork. I talked to them at length earlier this week about their mini-enterprise and was amazed at how professional and forward thinking they are. If I had half the vision and business cop-on of these two boys I'd be a very happy camper indeed.
It's amazing that all over Ireland and despite the recession, little businesses are cropping up and whirring away. In the food sector, small businesses are actually doing very well with a Bord Bia survey showing that food entrepreneurs have a healthy outlook on how not just the rest of 2011 will treat them but how well their business will do in future years. The McInerney boys' story is a great one. At heart they are lovely charming lads with a love of animals and great heads on their shoulders as my father would say. Check out my full interview with them in the Irish Times today...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2011/0924/1224304437138.html