Ham substitutes

Keeps both the salt and the smoke that make ham read as ham, but it is much leaner, so you lose the soft fatty richness and the faint sweetness, and the meat is more fibrous than silky.

Best for

sandwiches, split pea and bean soups, greens, quiche, scalloped potatoes, holiday main

The best all-round substitute, and the one to choose if you are avoiding pork. Use breast where you need neat slices and leg or thigh where the meat will simmer in a pot, since dark meat holds up far better to long cooking. Because it is leaner, add a tablespoon of butter or oil to dishes where ham fat would have enriched the sauce.

Cured pork loin rather than leg, so it is genuinely ham-like in flavour but leaner and less sweet, with no fat edge, and it comes in tidy rounds that dice neatly.

Best for

quiche, eggs Benedict, omelettes, pizza, pasta, diced into potatoes

Excellent wherever ham is diced or layered. Brown the pieces in a dry pan before adding them to a dish, because unlike ham it can taste a little flat straight from the package and browning wakes up the cured flavour. Buy the thicker-cut version if you can, since paper-thin slices curl and dry.

Much saltier, fattier and considerably smokier, and it crisps rather than staying soft, so a potato gratin made with bacon tastes bolder and more assertive and the little pieces snap instead of yielding.

Best for

quiche, pasta, gratins, bean soups, salads, greens

Use less than the recipe's ham weight or the dish will be overwhelmingly salty, and hold back the added salt until you taste. Render the bacon, drain most of the fat, and reserve a tablespoon of it to cook the aromatics in. Pancetta is unsmoked, so it is the better choice if you want the fat and salt without smoke taking over.

Far more intensely salty and complex than cooked ham, with a silky rather than chewy texture, so a little goes a long way and too much makes the whole dish taste aggressively cured.

Best for

pasta, wrapped around vegetables or meat, salads, sandwiches, finishing a soup

Add it off the heat or at the very end, since prosciutto turns leathery when cooked hard. It is a poor substitute for a bulk ingredient like diced ham in a casserole and an excellent one where the ham was there for flavour. Cut the recipe's salt substantially. Serrano ham and speck work the same way.

The closest thing to a real ham for a large cooked centrepiece, because it is still cured and smoked pork, though it is fattier and more richly flavoured and pulls into shreds far more readily than a leg ham slices.

Best for

holiday main, glazed roast, greens and beans, pulled pork sandwiches, soup base

Look for a cut labelled smoked picnic, smoked pork shoulder or cottage roll, all of which are cured. Glaze and roast at 325F until heated through, about 15 to 18 minutes per pound if already fully cooked. If you are looking at an uncured fresh pork shoulder instead, understand that it will taste of roast pork rather than ham, with grey-pink rather than rosy meat.

Salty and pork-flavoured in the right general direction but softer, more uniformly springy and without real smoke, so a fried rice or a breakfast hash works well while a sandwich tastes noticeably processed.

Best for

fried rice, breakfast hash, musubi, budae jjigae, omelettes, camping meals

It genuinely shines where ham gets crisped in a hot pan, because it browns hard and turns crisp at the edges. Cut into half-inch cubes or thick slices and fry in a dry pan until deeply coloured. Cut the recipe's salt, since it is saltier than most cooked ham.

The vegetarian route, and an honest assessment is that it delivers the smoke and much of the salt but nothing of the fatty, chewy bite, so a quiche or a pea soup tastes right and eats noticeably lighter.

Best for

quiche, split pea soup, bean dishes, pasta, greens, vegetarian sandwiches

Press smoked tofu, cube it and brown it hard in oil so the edges firm up, since untoasted tofu is soft in a way ham never is. For soups and beans, a piece of kombu or a spoonful of miso alongside the smoked paprika adds the savoury depth that cured pork would have contributed to the broth.