Big ham what amFor the
LTHForum 1,000-Recipe Potluck, I first planned to prepare a
well-aged country ham I possessed. Unfortunately, that ham turned out
not to have aged so well after all.
So I decided to make a regular city ham,
glazed according to the recipe Cathy2 had posted. It never occurred to me that I'd have trouble finding a ham. Nine supermarkets later, I was about to give up.
But after an
exhaustive search for an "off-season" ham, I finally located a suitable smoked ham at Peoria Packing. However, even though it was the smallest of the whole hams they had for sale, it was 23 pounds!
I've never cooked a ham so big in my life before. Here it is, in all its naked glory.
I had to buy a foil pan to bake it in, because it was too big for my biggest roasting pan (which can handle a 25-pound turkey. I guess turkeys are more compact).
As long as I was dealing with a ham of the likes I'd never made before, and a glaze I'd never used before, I decided to go whole hog and use the LTHers as guinea pigs for a cooking technique I hadn't tried before, either. So I used a modified version of the
Alton Brown technique that
CrazyC posted about.
In this method, instead of cutting off the skin and extra fat before cooking, you just score the skin. Then cook the ham for most of its time. Then, using tongs you pull off the diamonds of skin and whatever fat comes with them, before glazing and finishing cooking.
This technique is supposed to help keep the ham moist and allow the fat to flavor the meat more thoroughly than the usual method. Perhaps it does, but it doesn't make for such a pretty ham as removing the skin and scoring the underlying fat layer.
Here's the ham after I removed the skin and studded it with cloves:
Of course, with the thick glaze, it really didn't matter what the ham looked like underneath. This glaze, made from brown sugar, orange marmalade and Dijon mustard (I actually used spicy brown mustard), is so thick that I basically troweled it on with a spatula rather than trying to brush it on. The
original recipe calls for putting on more glaze at least three times during the cooking process. I had increased the recipe to allow for the bigger ham, but although I layered it on pretty generously, I still wound up with extra glaze.
Ham with first coat of glaze:
It comes out very dark and with a smoky, burnt-sugar taste. The
photo and
description at Saveur seem to bear out that this is how it's supposed to be.
I don't think I'd make this glaze again. The orange marmalade addition, to my taste, doesn't improve on my usual version of equal parts mustard and brown sugar. It didn't set up and become crusty all over the ham -- some parts remained kind of sticky and gloopy, even though I gave it an extra 15 minutes at 500 degrees. (I've heard -- but not verified -- that the Honey Baked Ham Co. sets its glazes with a butane torch.)
The ham had already reached an internal temperature of 160 degrees, so I was afraid to cook it too much longer, although when it was sliced it was perfectly moist and could probably have taken more cooking without drying out. Altogether, I baked it for about six hours, adding the glaze for the last hour and 45 minutes.
The potluck attendees seemed to enjoy it. They did a good job on this 23-pound haunch of pig. When I cut up the leftovers I took home, I wound up with just under 5 pounds of meat and a 2-pound bone (now reposing in my freezer for a future soup or bean project). I did not weigh the discarded skin or rendered fat, but I doubt it weighed more than a couple of pounds, at most.
Here's ronnie_suburban's terrific photo of the ham in all its splendor on the Figs' platter at the potluck.
City ham with Cathy2's glaze by LAZHere's the recipe as I made it.
Orange-glazed city ham for a crowd1 23-pound cryovac-packed smoked city ham on the bone
3 cups firmly packed brown sugar
3 cups orange marmalade
2 cups spicy brown mustard
About 1/2 cup bourbon
2 tablespoons whole cloves
Remove one oven rack and put the other on the lowest rung. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.
Remove the ham from the plastic bag and rinse thoroughly. Pat dry with paper towels, and using a clean box cutter on its lowest position, score the skin in a diamond pattern, cutting just through the skin and partly into the fat underneath. Place the ham in a large foil roasting pan set on a jelly-roll pan, insert a meat thermometer in the center -- not touching the bone -- and bake about 4 hours, or until the temperature reaches about 140 degrees.
While the ham bakes, stir together the brown sugar, marmalade and mustard. Use the bourbon to rinse out the marmalade and mustard jars and stir that in, too.
Remove the ham from the oven. Raise the oven heat to 350 degrees. Remove the meat thermometer. Using tongs, pull off the triangles of skin and any fat that comes with them. Stud the ham with cloves at the intersections of the scored lines.
Cover the ham with glaze. Put the meat thermometer back in in a new spot. Bake another 1-1/2 to 2 hours, adding additional glaze at least three times, until the ham registers 160 degrees. If the glaze still seems too wet. raise the oven heat to 500 degrees and cook another 15 minutes. Let cool and serve at room temperature. 45 to 50 servings.
G Wiv's close-up shows the carved ham.
LAZ City ham with Cathy2's glaze
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
