Recipes With Christmas Ham: Twelve Things to Do With the Leftovers

By Arthur Hodgson, Hamper Packing Manager at The Gourmet Pantry.

Leftover Christmas ham keeps best on the bone, wrapped in a damp cloth in the coldest part of the fridge and carved as you need it. From there it becomes sandwiches, a ploughman's plate, toasties, croquettes, fried rice, and soup from the bone in winter.

Twelve ideas follow, in the order you will want them: no cooking first, then the ones for when everybody has had enough of cold ham, then the bone. Nothing on this page asks you to buy a ham from us, because we do not stock one. I pack hampers in Corio for a living, and the relishes and chutneys that go into them all November turn out to be exactly what a leftover leg wants in December. If the shopping is still ahead of you, our guide to how much ham to buy per person keeps the leftovers to a size you can eat.

First, get it through the night

A cut ham dries out and takes on fridge smells faster than anything else left over from the day. Three habits deal with most of that.

• Leave it on the bone and carve as you go. Meat carved off in advance dries from every cut face at once. On the bone there is only one face, and the bone helps hold the cold.
• Wrap it in a ham bag or a clean tea towel, damp with water and wrung out hard, refreshed every day or two. A splash of vinegar in the water is the old Australian trick, and it does keep the cloth sweet.
• Coldest shelf, never the door, with the fridge running under 5°C. The door swings several degrees every time somebody goes looking for the trifle.

If you kept the rind, lay it back over the cut face before the leg goes into the bag. Beyond that, the label decides: the producer knows how their ham was cured and prints the window they stand behind, so follow that rather than a number off the internet. Anything you will not get through inside it, slice or dice and freeze flat in labelled portions, ready for the cooked ideas further down.

Cold ham, no cooking at all

1. The Boxing Day sandwich

White bread, cold butter spread to the edges, ham cut thicker than looks sensible, and relish. That is the whole thing, and it is what the leftovers exist for. The Fighting Furys tomato relish at $12.95 is the jar I pack most often, sweet and sharp enough to cut the fat. If you have any warning at all, make your own instead: our old fashioned tomato relish is a November job and it beats anything in a jar, ours included.

2. A ploughman's plate

Cold ham, a wedge of sharp cheddar, pickled onions, a boiled egg and a spoonful of Valley Produce Company ploughmans relish at $7.95, which is tomatoes, onions, apples and dried fruit and was built for this plate. Add crackers, and keep them quiet: plain crackerthins at $3.49 stay out of the way of the ham. It is lunch with no cooking, no washing up beyond a board, and it clears the cheese that is sitting there too. Our Christmas charcuterie board has the arrangement if you are feeding a houseful from it.

3. Ham with melon and mint

Thin slices of ham, cold rockmelon or honeydew cut into wedges, torn mint, a squeeze of lime and a grind of black pepper. Salt against sweet, the same logic as prosciutto and melon, and the one that works when it is 35°C and nobody will go near an oven. A thread of good olive oil over the top is worth the ten seconds it costs.

4. Rolls for the esky

Boxing Day usually ends up somewhere with sand or a cricket bat. Split rolls, butter, ham, a cos leaf for crunch and West Bengal Rifles mango chutney at $12.95. Chutney travels a great deal better than mayonnaise in a hot car, and the sweetness handles the salt of a ham that has spent a fortnight in brine.

When everyone has had enough of it cold

5. The toastie

Ham and cheese in a sandwich press is a low bar, and a spoonful of Caroline's caramelised onions at $16.95 clears it properly: onion cooked low and slow with rosemary and the faintest hint of chilli, filling the gap that cheese alone leaves. Grate the cheese rather than slicing it so it melts before the bread colours, and butter the outside of the bread instead of the pan.

6. Ham and eggs on the 27th

Cut a slab about a centimetre thick, fry it in a dry pan until the edges curl and catch, then fry an egg in the fat that renders out. Lancaster seeded mustard in the 110g size at $6.95 is the right partner here, wholegrain and tangy rather than hot, so nobody gets ambushed before coffee. Toast, and that is breakfast for a household that overdid it yesterday.

7. Ham, leek and mustard pie

For the one evening that turns cool. Sweat two sliced leeks in butter, stir through flour and milk to a loose white sauce, add a heaped teaspoon of Dijon and two big handfuls of diced ham, then tip it into a dish, lid it with puff pastry and bake until the top is properly brown. It freezes unbaked, which is the real argument for making it while the ham is still in front of you.

8. Pastry cases for New Year's Eve

Confiletas mini savoury pastry cases are $9.95 for twelve and need no oven: fill them with chopped ham, crème fraîche loosened with mustard, and chives. Or ham with cranberry sauce in the 110g size at $6.95, which is the answer to the jar that got opened on the day and barely touched. Fill them within an hour of serving, or the bases soften.

9. Croquettes

The best thing that happens to leftover ham, and the most work. Make a very thick white sauce, fold finely chopped ham through it, chill it overnight until it is firm enough to roll, then crumb it in panko at $12.95 and fry. Panko takes on less oil than fine crumbs and stays crisp longer. A teaspoon of Belazu rose harissa at $14.95 in the sauce sends them Spanish, and our guide to cooking with harissa paste covers the rest of that jar. Crumbed and frozen raw on a tray, they are party food for the rest of the summer.

The last of it

10. Pasta with ham, peas and lemon

Diced ham warmed in butter with a handful of frozen peas, tossed through short pasta with lemon zest, a lot of black pepper and parmesan. Fifteen minutes, one pan and a colander. Use the drier meat from the end of the leg here, because the butter brings it back.

11. Fried rice

Cold day-old rice, diced ham, peas, spring onion and egg, a hot pan and soy at the end. It eats through leftover ham faster than anything else on this list, and children eat it without negotiation.

12. The bone

Do not bin it. Wrap the bone with the meat still clinging to it and freeze it whole. Pea and ham soup in the middle of a Victorian July is worth a great deal more than pea and ham soup in December, when nobody in this country is asking for soup. If the freezer is already full, simmer the bone with an onion, a carrot and a bay leaf for two hours, strain it and freeze the stock flat instead. It is the best stock you will get for nothing all year, and it turns a bag of split peas or a risotto into something worth sitting down for. Taste it before you salt anything you make with it, because a ham bone brings its own.

Most of the twelve come down to one jar out of the cupboard. This is the shortlist, all of it shelf stable, so it can be bought in October and ignored until the day it is needed.

The apple and fennel chutney is the outlier in that list. It was made for slow roasted pork, and fennel against tart Granny Smith is close enough family that it earns its place next to cold ham with nothing else on the plate.

Common questions about leftover ham

How long does leftover Christmas ham keep in the fridge?

Go by the maker's label rather than a rule of thumb. Cures differ a great deal between producers, and the window printed on the ham is the one that producer stands behind. Keep it under 5°C on the coldest shelf, wrapped in a ham bag or a damp cloth, and freeze whatever you will not get through inside that window.

Can you freeze leftover Christmas ham?

Yes, and Boxing Day is the time to do it, not the following weekend. Slice or dice it first, press it flat in bags with the air pushed out, and label them, because every frozen bag looks identical by February. Ham comes back from the freezer slightly drier, so send it to the cooked ideas, the croquettes, the pie, fried rice and soup, and keep the fresh meat for sandwiches.

What can I make with leftover ham on Boxing Day?

Sandwiches with relish first, then a ploughman's plate, which has the useful side effect of clearing the cheese board as well. If the house is hot, ham with melon and mint takes five minutes and no heat at all. If people are heading out, rolls with mango chutney survive an esky better than anything built on mayonnaise. Leave the cooking until the 27th.

How do you store a ham once it is cut?

Leave it on the bone, lay the rind back over the cut face, and wrap the whole leg in a ham bag or a clean tea towel damp with water and a splash of vinegar. Refresh the cloth every day or two. Keep it on the coldest shelf and never in the door, and carve only what is about to be eaten.

Leftovers are the part of Christmas nobody plans for, and the fix is a shelf rather than a recipe: two relishes, a mustard, a chutney. Our mustards, relishes and chutneys start at $6.95 for the 110g jars, shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100, and orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our packing room in Corio, Victoria. If you would rather send the food than carve it, our Christmas hampers are packed by hand in that same room. For everything either side of the ham, our guide to Christmas food in Australia works through the season month by month.