Ham Tetrazzini: Wide Noodles, Sherry Sauce, and No Added Salt

Tetrazzini is a chicken dish by default and a turkey dish for four days every November, and ham almost never comes up — which is odd, because a holiday ham leaves more usable meat than a turkey does. It works. It is not the chicken version with ham swapped in.

Two things change. The ham arrives cured, salted to the point where salt is a preservative rather than a seasoning, so anything you add to the sauce lands on top of it. And ham does not shred. It cubes, and those cubes stay where you put them.

The base version is Chicken Tetrazzini: Firm Pasta, Real Sherry Sauce, No Mush, linked at the bottom, and the method is the same: brown the mushrooms hard, reduce real sherry, pull the pasta short. The original puts a teaspoon and a half of kosher salt in the sauce. This one puts in none.

Ingredients

This fills a 9×13 and serves eight. Three cups of half-inch dice is about a pound, a quarter of a holiday ham.

For the Casserole

• 3 cups cooked ham in 1/2-inch dice (about 1 pound)
• 12 ounces wide egg noodles
• 1 pound cremini mushrooms, sliced 1/4 inch thick
• 1 cup frozen peas, straight from the freezer
• 2 tablespoons kosher salt, for the pasta water only

For the Sherry Cream Sauce

• 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 large shallot, minced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 cup dry sherry (not cooking sherry, which is salted)
• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 3 cups unsalted or low-sodium chicken stock, warmed
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 3/4 cup finely grated Parmesan
• 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 3/4 teaspoon black pepper

For the Top

• 1 cup panko breadcrumbs
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
• 1/3 cup grated Parmesan
• 2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley

How to Make It

Prep: 30 minutes  |  Bake: 30 minutes  |  Serves: 8

1. Heat the oven to 375°F. Boil the noodles in heavily salted water for 3 minutes less than the package says for al dente — they should still have a pale, chalky core. Drain, rinse cool, and toss with a teaspoon of oil.
2. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms in close to one layer and leave them alone for 4 minutes. Do not salt them. Stir and cook 5 minutes more, until their liquid has gone and the edges brown.
3. Add the shallot and cook 2 minutes, then the garlic for 30 seconds. Pour in the sherry and let it bubble down until the pan is nearly dry, about 3 minutes.
4. Sprinkle the flour over everything and stir constantly for 90 seconds. Add the warm stock in three additions, whisking smooth each time, then the cream. Simmer 5 minutes, until it coats the back of a spoon.
5. Off the heat, once it has stopped steaming, stir in the Parmesan, Dijon, nutmeg, lemon zest, and pepper. Add no salt. It should taste slightly flat and a little too lemony. That is correct. Taste a cube of your ham too.
6. Fold in the noodles, the ham, and the frozen peas with tongs and a light hand. The noodles are sturdy underdone, but stirring them like batter will tear them.
7. Taste the mixture now, before it goes in the oven. This is the only moment salt can go in, and usually it should not. If it is still flat with the ham in it, add 1/4 teaspoon. Pepper is usually the better answer.
8. Scrape it into a buttered 9×13. Mix the panko with the melted butter, Parmesan, and parsley and scatter it over the top. Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until the crust is deep golden and the edges bubble.
9. Let it rest 10 minutes. The sauce is loose at minute zero and sets as it cools, which is the difference between a portion that holds and a puddle.

Can You Make It the Night Before?

Let the sauce cool 20 minutes before the noodles go in if the dish is going into the refrigerator, because hot sauce over drained noodles keeps cooking them on the counter. A cold 9×13 wants 45 minutes out, then 45 at 375°F.

The overnight salt migration is the part I would not improvise. Ham sitting in cream sauce for twelve hours gives up salt and takes on sauce, which is pleasant for the ham and alarming for the sauce. If it tastes sharp in the morning, stir in 1/4 cup of cream before it bakes.

It freezes decently unbaked, because the noodles are underdone enough that freezer damage has less to work with. Assemble without the topping, freeze two months, thaw 24 hours, then top and bake about 50 minutes.

Wide Noodles or Rice: The Salt Difference Nobody Mentions

The shape is the easy half. A wide flat noodle suits ham specifically: a half-inch egg noodle ribbon, or pappardelle torn into thirds, has a broad face for sauce to sit on, where a round strand sheds most of what you toss it in. Ham is smoky enough to need that extra cream in the same bite.

Then there is rice, which gets asked constantly, because ham and rice is a real casserole tradition and because rice is what is in the pantry. You can build this over rice and it is good. But one change matters more than anything else, and almost no version mentions it.

Pasta is drained. Rice is not. Noodles go into a gallon of water carrying two tablespoons of kosher salt, which seasons them from the outside in, and then nearly all of that salt goes down the sink. They arrive seasoned but not salty. Rice is cooked in a measured amount of liquid and absorbs every bit of it — that is not a side effect, that is the method. All the sodium in the stock, plus everything the cured ham releases while it bakes, stays in the dish. Nothing leaves. Then it concentrates: thirty minutes at 375°F drives off water as steam, and the salt does not go with it.

So the adjustment has to be deliberate. Use unsalted or low-sodium stock, reading the carton rather than the front of the box. Add no salt anywhere, and drop the Parmesan to half a cup. And taste it before it goes in the oven, which is the step people skip. Unbaked, with the ham folded in, it should taste slightly bland. If it tastes right then, it will be too salty coming out.

Diced Ham Sits in Pockets, and You Season for That

Poached chicken and roast turkey pull apart into irregular wisps, and a wisp is mostly surface, so folded into a cream sauce they blur into the dish. Ham will not do that for you. It has been through a brine and a long low cook, so it comes off a knife in cubes.

So the salt is not evenly distributed and cannot be made so. You have a mild sauce with a couple of hundred small salty objects suspended in it, and every bite is either sauce-and-noodle or sauce-and-ham. That is the dish, not a flaw. But the fix is geometric: cut the dice at a half inch, not three-quarters. A pound at half an inch gives nearly twice as many pieces, halving the distance between pockets.

Ham behaves differently in the sauce too. Poached chicken contributes water and thins it; wet-cured ham gives up two or three tablespoons over the bake, barely noticeable as thinning but carrying real salt with it. The seasoning shifts between the fold and the table.

Sherry and Mushrooms Earn More Here Than With Chicken

Dry sherry is an oxidized wine, which is where the nutty, faintly bruised-apple note comes from, and that note has an obvious affinity with cured pork. Reduce it until the pan is nearly dry or you keep the alcohol and lose the payoff. What you must not reach for is the bottle labeled cooking sherry: it is salted to make it shelf-stable, and half a cup carries over a thousand milligrams of sodium into a dish designed around adding none.

The mushrooms are the counterweight to a cup of cream, and the browning in step two is most of the depth here. One departure from habit: do not salt them in the pan. That puts salt into the one part of this dish that cannot shed it, and creminis brown on their own in four undisturbed minutes.

Questions People Ask

Can I make ham tetrazzini with rice instead of noodles?

Yes, with one change: use unsalted or low-sodium stock and add no salt at all. Rice is not drained the way pasta is, so it absorbs every bit of liquid it cooks in, and the sodium from the stock and the cured ham stays in the dish and concentrates as it bakes. Taste it before it bakes; it should be slightly bland.

Do I really add no salt to the sauce at all?

With wet-cured ham, none, literally. A pound of it brings more sodium than a teaspoon and a half of kosher salt would, and it releases that into the sauce over thirty minutes in the oven. The one place salt belongs is the pasta water, which gets drained.

What kind of ham works best?

A plain wet-cured city ham is the easy case: salty but neutral, and it dices into cubes that hold their shape. A spiral-cut glazed ham works if you trim the sugary outer face off first. Dry-cured country ham will overwhelm three cups of anything — use one cup as seasoning and make up the bulk with diced chicken.

Why did my noodles come out mushy?

They were cooked too long before they went in. Egg noodles sit in a 375°F oven absorbing sauce for 30 minutes, so anything that started at al dente finishes well past it. Pull them a full three minutes early and rinse them cool.

Can I use stock made from the ham bone?

For the noodle version yes, diluted — ham-bone stock is often saltier than boxed broth, so start with half stock and half water and taste it before it goes into the roux. For the rice version I would not, because nothing gets drained and there is no walking it back.