Gammon Steak with Pineapple and Fried Duck Egg

I’m back from a wonderful break in the South of France, with not an old man pub, steak and kidney pie or pint of decent beer to be found –  a refreshing change.  As you can see from the picture below, my attempt to consume my own body weight in seafood went well, much to the amazement of the German family at the neighbouring table, who felt obliged to give a play-by-play commentary on my (rather large) lunch. I felt a bit like a hippo during feeding time at Frankfurt Zoo.

Anyway, I’m not sure that a boys’ barbecue and poker night was strictly what a dietician would have recommended after my gluttonous holiday, but that’s where I found myself at the weekend just a couple of days after getting back to London. With my pal Luke and I in charge of feeding the troops, and the sun shining for once, we decided it was time to try cooking some of Gordon’s pub food on the barbecue. To be honest, not many of the book’s recipes lend themselves to outdoor grilling, but this one for gammon, pineapple and duck egg certainly looked a good candidate. If you have never tried pineapple cooked on the barbie I suggest you give it a go. Most fruits are too fragile to stand up to grilling, but you will be amazed at how great fresh pineapple looks and tastes cooked over hot coals.

On the way out to the Essex countryside we stopped off at the supermarket and picked up the ingredients along with a decent (i.e. large) selection of brews.  Below, you can see the ingredients of gammon (edit: which in the States is known as ham steak – thanks LizC!) , a large pineapple, some duck eggs, butter and sugar.

To prep the dish, I melted some butter and used a pastry brush to lightly coat the gammon steaks.

Pineapples are something of a pain in the arse to prepare on account of all the “eyes” on the outside of the fruit. I used a serrated fruit knife to top and tail the pineapple, before slicing off the tough outside skin. As you can see, the fleshy fruit remaining is pockmarked on the outside by hard, little black craters.

These are the “eyes”, and you need to remove each one, either individually or by carving groves into the pineapple that take out several eyes at a time. I made a bit of a dog’s dinner out of mine!

Next, the pineapple was cut into roughly 1cm thick slices and the core of each slice removed. These rings were then brushed with a little melted butter and sprinkled with sugar ready for grilling.

The barbeque had been fired up earlier in the day and by now the coals were white hot and just about right for grilling on. First up were the pineapple rings, which were grilled for about 4 minutes on each side until they  had started to blacken and the fruit was soft all the way through.

Luke helped by popping these into a low oven to keep warm as he got on with frying off the duck eggs simply in a medium pan with some olive oil.

Whilst the eggs were frying, I was grilling the gammon steaks on the barbeque. Gammon is cut from the hind leg of a pig  and is “Wiltshire cured” in brine just like regular bacon. These steaks only took a couple of minutes on each side and they were done.

I took the steaks through to the kitchen to assemble the plates whilst Luke tried to drag the rest of the guys away from the dart board to eat – never an easy task. I was really pleased with how the dishes looked. With a few green leaves on the side, the plates looked really colourful. Although I’m fairly sure the aesthetics were wasted on a group of hungry blokes already a few beers into the afternoon, but still.

How did they taste? To be honest, I really enjoyed this one – the smokiness of the gammon with the sweet caramelised pineapple and the richness of the yolk from the duck egg all mixed together really well. Much more fun that the usual burgers or sausages and definably one I would recommend trying next time you fire up the barbeque at home. How about the rest of the day? I didn’t finish the card game a rich man but, as I always say about poker nights, “it’s not the winning or losing that counts, it’s how drunk you get”. In that regard, by the time the morning sun was rising over the last few remaining stragglers, well, by then we were all winners…