The 72-Hour Watermelon Ham
A whole watermelon salt-cured, smoked and pressed over three days until it slices like jamón and tastes like the sea met a fruit stall. Our kitchen built it for a vegetarian who missed Iberian ham; the meat eaters ate most of it.
- 1 watermelon, about 5 kg
- 800 g coarse sea salt
- 40 g sugar
- 25 g smoked paprika
- 15 g ground chipotle
- Oak chips for smoking
- Olive oil to finish
- Peel the watermelon completely, removing all white rind, and cut lengthways into four long wedges.
- Mix the salt, sugar, paprika and chipotle. Pack the wedges in the cure in a deep tray, cover, and refrigerate for 24 hours, turning once.
- Rinse the wedges quickly under cold water and pat completely dry. Rest uncovered in the fridge for 2 hours to form a tacky surface.
- Cold smoke over oak for 4 hours, keeping the chamber below 25 C.
- Wrap each wedge in muslin, stack in a tray, cover with a board and a 3 kg weight, and refrigerate for 48 hours. Pour off the liquid daily.
- Unwrap, rub with a little olive oil, and slice as thinly as you can across the grain. Serve at room temperature.
The dry-curing of a ham is a matter of salt, time and air: salt draws out the water, time lets enzymes work on the protein, air dries the surface into a rind. Watermelon has none of the protein, but it has more water than almost any food on earth, and salt removes water from a melon just as surely as from a leg of pork. Our kitchen wondered how far the process could be pushed on a fruit, and the answer is much further than seems reasonable.
A five-kilo watermelon, peeled, quartered lengthways and packed in coarse salt with smoked paprika, Mexican chipotle and a little sugar, loses two kilos of water in the first twenty-four hours. Rinsed, dried and cold-smoked over oak for four hours, then pressed under a board and a weight for two more days in the fridge, it emerges dark red, dense and translucent at the edges. Sliced paper thin on a ham slicer it looks like a lean serrano and tastes of smoke, salt, cured fruit and a chipotle warmth that arrives late.
The numbers
- Yield: a 5 kg melon gives roughly 1.4 kg of finished 'ham', about 28 percent. The rest is water you pour away.
- Salt: 800 g of coarse sea salt for a 5 kg melon, mixed with 40 g sugar, 25 g smoked paprika and 15 g ground chipotle.
- Time: 24 hours in salt, 4 hours cold smoke (below 25 C), 48 hours pressed. Keeps a week wrapped in the fridge.
How to serve it
Exactly as you would serve ham: thin, at room temperature, on bread rubbed with tomato and olive oil, or draped over a chilled melon of the ordinary kind, which is a joke the table will enjoy. It also melts into a stir-fry the way lardons do, and it makes a broth, simmered with kombu, that would fool most people into thinking there was a bone in it. If you have no smoker, a stovetop smoking box with oak chips for 40 minutes gives a lighter version.
