Recipe Testing: Disney Parks Blog Holiday Ham Slider with Cranberry-Bacon Jam

If you’re lucky enough to have Thanksgiving leftovers next week, you may want to try this recipe from Disney Parks Blog. We did and we’re happy to say it is scrumtralescent. There are a few things we’ll adjust next time, but this was an easy recipe to complete and the resulting jam jar was still full after making four hefty sliders. Let’s get stuck in, shall we?

You probably have most of the ingredients at home now, or you’ve got something close. We had regular, thin bacon at home but bought the thick version just for this recipe. Same with the vinegar. It tastes like a deep rice wine vinegar or even a champagne vinegar would be excellent substitutes here. Really, any white balsamic will do.

If you don’t love Gruyere cheese, a baby Swiss would be so nice with the ham. Or even a white cheddar! Honestly, the jam is so good that slapping a few slices of plastic cheese on the meat would still be glorious. Let’s review the easy steps that get us to the good stuff.

The only chopping required is for the onions and the bacon. The recipe calls for 3 slices but we’re adding 4 next time. The cranberries are, obviously, tart and that’s our excuse for needing more bacon.

The recipe says to “cook the bacon on medium heat in a medium saucepan until crisp” but we used a gas stove and were closer to medium-low. We probably could have kept it on the heat for a few more minutes but the mixture of a meatier bite and a crunchy piece was nice. Drain your bacon and try to stop your partner and child from eating the pieces from the bowl. Another reason you should use 5 slices of bacon. Next, throw the onions (that you hopefully chopped more uniformly than we did) into the bacon grease. Stir and mush them around so you get all the good bacon bits at the bottom of the pan. The recipe says to sauté the onions for 8-10 minutes until brown. We were closer to 13 minutes before we moved on to the next step.

Is it sinful to be proud of a pot of onions? Because just look at the color in the pan on the left! That’s what our onions looked like after they got some nice caramelization and we added the brown sugar, vinegar, and salt. Finally, when your onions make you proud, you’ll add the cranberries, orange juice, and ground cloves. The orange juice was so nice that we’ll probably whip out the microplane next time and chuck in some orange zest. Let this simmer on medium for 10-15 minutes (ours was 15) until the cranberries have all popped open and it starts to get thick. When the jam looks like your desired consistency, or, when it looks like you could pile a heaping spoonful on top of a sandwich and it won’t be runny, take it off the heat and add in the bacon.

The recipe says to refrigerate until ready to serve but ours wasn’t even close to cool before we were assembling the sandwiches.

Finally, one other change we will be making the next time we try this recipe (other than the 7 slices of bacon) is that we’ll toast the buns, then add the cheese, and throw everything under the broiler for a few seconds.

Do you want to see more recipe testing of Disney favorites? Let us know!