Tim Wilson of The Ginger Pig on the perfect Christmas ham
A great ham is one of the joys of the Christmas period, and thus Tim Wilson of The Ginger Pig takes a spot on our list of Christmas heroes.
This Christmas, Country Life is raising a glass to the unsung heroes who work all year round to make our seasonal celebrations special. All their stories will be collected together on our Christmas section.
Today, it's Tim Wilson, founder of The Ginger Pig.
When Tim Wilson started The Ginger Pig, selling meat at London’s Borough Market, he named it after his own Tamworth pigs, a traditional native breed with a distinctive rust-coloured coat.
These days, to supply eight shops and a busy online order book, he sources pork from other small, high-welfare producers, such as Jim Farrington with his Tamworth and pedigree Welsh pigs in North Yorkshire and the Butler family in Suffolk. Their piglets are fully free range after weaning and are slow-grown to 25 weeks, producing succulent, flavoursome meat.
Scoring the fat in a traditional diamond pattern makes a ham look as good as it tastes.
The Ginger Pig offers both cooked ham and uncooked gammon. The joints will have been brined in brown sugar and curing salts and air dried. For ham, a joint is steam cooked and you can order it glazed in the company’s signature mix or plain, skin on, to finish at home.
If you’ve ordered a gammon, you need to soak it first to get rid of salt from the curing process before baking and The Ginger Pig suggests two recipes on its website. The first is simple: bake over an inch of water at 180˚C for 45 minutes per kilo. The more exciting one involves onions studded with cloves, allspice, bay and slow-cooking in dry cider; you can play around with the spices and substitute wine for cider (Nigella Lawson famously cooked hers in Coca-Cola).
Then, glaze your ham: remove the rind, score the fat in a diamond pattern, paint with honey, mustard and brown sugar and return to a hot oven to caramelise. I like a good layer of fat on my ham. Nicola at The Ginger Pig assures me that the slower-growing native breeds naturally produce more fat, but you can add a note to your order requesting either a leaner or a fatter joint depending on whether you side with Jack Spratt or his wife.
Tim Wilson's Christmas treat ‘After a busy, noisy day, I like to go into the cold, frosty garden with a glass of kir royale knowing that winter is done and I can look forward to spring.’
