North America · Volume 34, The Hollow, the Ridge and the Mill Town
Country Ham with Red-Eye Gravy
Appalachia and the Upland South, United States
Illustration
- Time
- 20 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 56 sources in the brief
As tradition built it
Country Ham with Red-Eye Gravy
Serves 4. About 20 minutes.
Ingredients
- 4 slices country ham, about 1cm thick
- about 200ml strong black coffee
- 1 tbsp, optional a spoonful of sugar or preserves, optional, to cut the salt
Method
- If the ham is very salty, soak the slices in water for a couple of hours beforehand and pat dry.
- Fry the ham slices in a dry or lightly greased cast iron skillet over medium-high heat until browned on both sides and heated through. Remove and keep warm.
- Pour the coffee into the hot pan, scraping up the browned bits, and let it bubble and reduce slightly for a minute or two into a thin gravy, stirring in a spoonful of sugar or preserves if you like, to cut the salt.
- Pour the gravy over the ham, or serve it alongside for spooning over biscuits.
Notes
Genuine American country ham cannot currently be confirmed as importable to the UK: the UK does not permit pork produced using ractopamine, a growth-promoting feed additive still legal and common in US pork production. Trealy Farm Charcuterie (Monmouthshire, Wales) is the nearest UK equivalent in ethos only, since its product is European-style, eaten thin-sliced and raw, genuinely different from the salt-forward, cook-before-eating American tradition.
What a modern chef changes
The dry-cure logic that makes the ham what it is, applied at home, at a domestic scale and timescale.
Rung 3
Method
- Cure a boneless pork leg joint with a measured salt, brown sugar and pepper rub, roughly 3 per cent of the meat's weight in salt, for one week per kilogram in the fridge, then cold smoke it on a Big Green Egg fitted with a cold smoke generator for several hours without cooking it, a genuine home-scale analogue of the commercial curing months a real country ham undergoes, honestly labelled as a shorter, smaller version rather than a substitute for the real thing.
- Build the red-eye gravy with a cold-brew coffee concentrate rather than a hot pot of coffee, giving a rounder, less bitter reduction that still deglazes the pan cleanly.