Ingredients · Tinned meat
Tinned ham
How long it keeps
About 6 months unopened
Once opened, about 3 days, refrigerated.
Source (unopened): FoodKeeper (USDA), 108 Ham, shelf-stable cans, 6–9 Months · https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/fsis-foodkeeper-data
Source (once opened): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-to-chill-freeze-and-defrost-food-safely/how-to-chill-freeze-and-defrost-food-safely
What ends it. The food and the tin slowly react. That changes taste and texture rather than making it unsafe.
How to make it last longer
Tinned ham keeps for less time than you would think
Of the tinned meats, ham is the short-lived one. USDA FoodKeeper gives
shelf-stable canned ham six to nine months, where it gives corned beef and
tinned chicken five years. Check the date when you buy it, put it at the back,
and eat it within months rather than keeping it as a long-term store.
Check the label: some tinned ham belongs in the fridge
Not every tin of ham is shelf-stable. FoodKeeper has a separate entry for canned
ham labelled “keep refrigerated”: it is stored in the fridge, unopened, for
six to nine months, and freezing it is not recommended. If the tin says keep
refrigerated, it is not a store cupboard food however much it looks like one.
In a van or a tent without a fridge, buy the shelf-stable kind.
Salt, and cooking with it
800 mg of sodium per 100 g is about 2 g of salt, over the 1.5 g that the
NHS counts as high.
Season what you cook it with lightly, and taste before adding more.
It is already cooked. Diced and fried for a few minutes it takes colour and
gets much more interesting. Its natural partner is the pea:
ham and pea soup uses a tin of each, with
marrowfat peas collapsing into the body
of the soup.
Storage
Cool, dark, and check the date rather than assuming. This is the one tin here that is not a long-term store: FoodKeeper gives shelf-stable canned ham six to nine months where corned beef gets five years, because it is a wetter, less heavily cured product. Buy it to eat, not to hoard.
The pack
- Typical UK size
- 340 g
- Weight packed
- 375 g
- Volume
- 360 ml
Computed from net weight and standard pack geometry, not weighed. Manufacturers publish net weight and nobody publishes packed weight or displaced volume, so this is an estimate and is labelled as one.
Per 100 g
Deliberately narrow. These are the five things a long-life diet
actually gets wrong, plus energy and protein. It is not a general
nutrition model and is not meant to be.
- Energy
- 107 kcal
- Protein
- 18.4 g
- Fibre
- 0.1 g
- Vitamin C
- 0 mg
- Vitamin A
- 0 µg
- Omega-3
- 0.06 g
- Sodium
- 800 mg
Source: CoFID 2021, 19-496 Ham
1 recipe using tinned ham