Vegetarian Ham Part 2

(upbeat music) <v ->So now that I’ve peeled my watermelon,</v>

the next stage is to brine it. So the brine’s nicely infused and we have all of these flavors. Take my watermelon

and now that the brine has had time to chill we can put this inside. (upbeat music) Take our brine like so

and we place the watermelon inside okay. It’s really important that the watermelon is totally submerged. So if you need to take a smaller container to mean that it covers the watermelon then do this, but it’s really important that it remains completely submerged in the brine. So we’re not gonna make you wait 24 hours. So this is one that was prepared already. So you can see the difference in the watermelon. Now it’s really taken on this lovely translucent kind of color. It’s also softened a little bit. So this is gonna give us some more of a kind of jelly like texture. So it’s gonna be much more pleasurable to eat when we smoke it.

And the consistency is sort of a little bit different. All the flavors have really had time to penetrate in here slowly. That’s the importance of putting it in the brine when it’s cold. If you put it in when it’s hot it really takes on too much salt, too much flavor and you end up with a salty watermelon. What we’re looking for here is a nice balance of flavor and a nice delicate finish to the dish. So that’s our watermelon ready to go into the brine. Keep that for one moment, to the side for one minute next we’re gonna make our spice rub. So spice rub as we said before we have smoked paprika

and sweet paprika.

We’ve got some smoked garlic powder and some cayenne pepper.

And then we have a nice spice mix of chili, coriander and fennel seeds here as well. This we’re gonna put in, Normally in a spice mix you often find sugar. So the sugar will really helps with the caramelization and gives you this maillard reaction. So the maillard reaction is the caramelization of proteins which is really important in cooking. It gives you this real depth of flavor, this caramel, this roasted kind of flavor. The reason I’m not adding it the watermelon is quite sweet already. So we don’t really need to add any more sugar. What we really need to add to the watermelon is spice, smoke and salt. So that’s why you can all of these ingredients are adapted.

So we give this a good mix like so. (upbeat background music)

And again I haven’t added any salt to this mixture because it’s been in a salty brine for 24 hours already. So we’re hoping that it’s got a good flavor already.

Okay, next take my watermelon and literally just cover it in the spice mix like so.

And really be generous here.

You’re giving it a nice crust

and that’s gonna give this nice. And you can see already it’s taking shape. Starting to look a little bit more like a piece of meat. So as I said we’re really kind of playing with people’s perception here a little bit about what what plant-based cooking is or what vegetarian cooking is. So we’re gonna remove this.

Spice mix can be kept you can use this again for other preparations.

And we’re gonna make, next we’re gonna take it the watermelon and we’re gonna make this kind of signature cross hatch effect like on a ham. So you take a knife, very sharp knife and you carefully make some nice incisions. (upbeat music)

It really gives you the impression that you’re about to eat a piece of meat. So it’s kind of a fun way to prepare something and play with people’s ideas. So we place this on our tray, like so and now that’s ready to smoke. Okay, so now I have my watermelon here prepared, marinated, brined and in the spice rub. Now I’m gonna take it over to the brilliant piece of equipment we have here. This is our Josper oven.

In this oven it combines

the possibility to grill and charcoal

also the convection heat of an oven. So for this particular dish I’ve set up the charcoal on the right hand side and then I’ve left the left hand side free. Like this we can regulate the temperature, we can keep it ideally around 130 degrees C 120 to 230. So we can smoke the watermelon over a long period of time. To the charcoal I’m going to add some wood chips soaked in water, like so and as I said before, it’s really important they’re soaked in water so they have a slow burn and they give a maximum amount of flavor.

So the beauty of this oven is you can control the airflow. So you can have the possibility of cooking on charcoal but with the accuracy of an oven. So we’re gonna close it here. We’re gonna restrict the airflow and we’re gonna smoke it for four hours at 120 degrees for four hours.

And we can see after four hours, I’ve increased the heat a little bit at the end just to get a nice color. And we’ve got this lovely kind of smoky ham. So next we take our watermelon using a meat fork, lift it out like so

and we have the finished product. Okay, so what’s really important is as you take the time to smoke this properly if you do wanna do it in two hours what you’ll end up with is a hot watermelon with a little bit of smoky flavor on the outside. Really needs that time for the smoke to penetrate, for the brine to penetrate for all these spices to really get through the watermelon. So next as you can see visually looking pretty good like a ham meat fork again as another aesthetic. So we can just cut through the watermelon like so and inside reveal this lovely juicy watermelon ham.

Take a couple of slices like so.

(upbeat music)

Like so.

A little bit of fleur de sel

on top and we can just garnish it here.

I’ll put some nice peppery herbs which are gonna go really well with that. Okay. If you want to serve this a nice tahini dressing, some grilled lettuce, some grill vegetables that would be perfect. Hope you enjoyed. Thank you. (upbeat music)