Somewhere around the second week of December the question stops being what to cook and starts being what to cook for fourteen people, some of whom arrive at four and some of whom arrive at seven. A ham is the answer to that question. It sits in a low oven doing nothing dramatic for two hours, it is as good at room temperature as it is hot, and nobody has ever been disappointed to see one carried out of the kitchen.
Here is the part people get wrong. The ham you buy at the grocery store is already cooked. You are not cooking it. You are warming it through gently and putting a lacquer on the outside, and almost everything that goes wrong with a holiday ham comes from treating it like a raw roast and blasting it.
So this one goes in at 300°F under foil with a couple of cups of apple cider in the pan, and the glaze — organic brown sugar and paprika out of the Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em rub, more cider, Dijon and a little vinegar — goes on in three thin coats right at the end. Three thin coats is the whole trick. One thick one slides off into the pan and burns there.
The cider is not decoration. Henderson County apples came in this fall and the presses are still running, and cider reduced down with brown sugar and mustard is what makes this taste like something somebody made, rather than something that arrived with a glaze packet taped to the bag.
Put the bone aside when you are done. It belongs in a pot of collards.
Holiday Glazed Ham with Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em
A bone-in half ham warmed low under foil with apple cider, then lacquered with three thin coats of an organic BBQ rub and cider glaze. Feeds twelve to sixteen and holds while people arrive.
Ingredients
For the ham
- 1 bone-in half ham, 8 to 10 lb, fully cooked (shank or butt end; spiral-cut works — see Chef's notes)
- 2 cups apple cider, for the pan
- 2 tablespoons Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em seasoning
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
For the cider glaze
- 1½ cups apple cider
- ⅓ cup organic brown sugar, packed
- 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
- 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1 tablespoon Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em seasoning
- 1 teaspoon finely grated orange zest (optional)
On the table
- 2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley (optional)
- Coarse grain mustard
- The skimmed pan juices
Instructions
- Take the ham out of the refrigerator about an hour before it goes in the oven, and heat the oven to 300°F with a rack in the lowest third. A ham straight from a cold refrigerator adds the better part of half an hour, and it warms unevenly while it catches up.
- Unwrap the ham and look it over. Pull off the plastic disc that is often stuck over the cut end of the bone, and pat the whole thing dry with paper towel.
- If your ham is not spiral-cut, trim the rind and any fat cap down to about ¼ inch, then score the fat in a diamond lattice, cuts about ¼ inch deep and an inch apart. Stop at the fat; do not cut into the meat. Those cuts are where the glaze collects, which is the entire reason the finished ham looks the way it does. If it is spiral-cut, skip this — the slices already are the crevices.
- Rub the softened butter over the whole surface, then pat 2 tablespoons of the seasoning all over, pressing it down into the scoring or between the slices. The butter is glue, and the brown sugar already in the rub needs the fat to caramelize properly.
- Set the ham cut side down in a roasting pan and pour the 2 cups of cider into the bottom of the pan — around the ham, never over it, which would wash the rub straight off. Tent the pan tightly with foil.
- Bake about 12 minutes per pound, roughly 1 hour 45 minutes for a 9 lb ham, until a thermometer pushed into the thickest part away from the bone reads 110°F to 120°F. Look once halfway through and add a splash of water if the pan has gone dry.
- While it heats, make the glaze. Put the 1½ cups cider, brown sugar, Dijon, vinegar, butter, the remaining 1 tablespoon of seasoning and the orange zest in a small saucepan over medium heat. Simmer and stir 12 to 15 minutes, until it has reduced by about half and coats the back of a spoon. Do not wander off at the end: sugar syrup turns into candy in under a minute.
- Raise the oven to 400°F. Take the foil off, brush a third of the glaze over the whole ham and down into the cuts, and return it uncovered for 10 minutes. Do it twice more, 10 minutes each time. Three thin coats build a lacquer that stays on the ham; one thick coat slides into the pan and burns there.
- Pull it when the thermometer reads 140°F. (That is the USDA figure for reheating a fully cooked ham from a USDA-inspected plant. A ham repackaged somewhere else, or any ham you are reheating as leftovers, goes to 165°F.) Move it to a board, tent it loosely, and leave it alone for 15 to 20 minutes.
- Pour the pan juices into a jug and skim the fat off the top. Taste them before you do anything else — a cured ham is salty and so are its juices, and a splash of cider is usually all they want. Carve down to the bone and out along it, scatter the parsley if you are using it, and put the jus and the coarse mustard on the table.
Why 300°F, and why covered. A supermarket ham is already fully cooked and cured. Nothing you do in the oven makes it more done — it only makes it drier. The job is to bring the middle up to temperature without driving the moisture out of the outside, and a low covered oven with cider steaming underneath does that. The hot part comes at the very end, and only to set the glaze.
Do not add salt anywhere. A cured ham is salty on its own, and Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em is built on sea salt as well. Between the two there is plenty. That is also why the glaze gets vinegar and mustard rather than more seasoning, and why you taste the pan juices before you reach for anything.
Spiral-cut or whole. Spiral-cut is easier to serve and it dries out faster, because every one of those slices is a surface. Same temperatures, same glaze, but start checking ten minutes earlier and be generous getting the glaze down between the slices. A whole, unsliced half ham that you score yourself holds more moisture and looks better coming to the table.
What is in season right now. Nearly everything that belongs beside this is coming in. Collards and kale are sweetening after the first cool nights, which is when they are at their best. North Carolina sweet potatoes are at the peak of their harvest. Cabbage, turnips, rutabaga and winter squash are all in. And Henderson County apples came in this fall and store well, with the cider presses still running, which is where the three and a half cups of cider in this recipe come from.
The bone is the second dinner. Do not throw it out. A ham bone turns a pot of collards or a pot of beans into something else entirely — drop it in with the greens and a little water and let it go an hour. Ours ends up in New Year's Black Eyed Peas most years.
Ahead of time, and for a crowd. The ham can come out of the oven an hour before anybody sits down and nothing is lost; it is genuinely good warm rather than hot, and fine at room temperature. If people are arriving at different times, glaze it, rest it, carve half of it and leave the rest whole on the board so it does not dry out while it waits.
Leftovers. Thin slices into a skillet with butter for breakfast, under a fried egg. Diced into the greens. Or on soft rolls with coarse mustard, which is what everyone actually wants at nine o'clock that night.
On the label. Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em is USDA Certified Organic, gluten free and kosher, with no MSG, no fillers and no anti-caking agents — just sea salt, organic brown sugar, garlic, paprika, onion, black pepper, mustard seed, cayenne, ginger and ancho chile. It only comes in a 5 oz resealable pouch, and that is the reason why: a blend built on garlic and sugar will cake in a glass jar without anti-caking chemicals, and we would rather you broke it up in the bag. The ham itself and the mustard are not ours — read those labels yourself if gluten matters at your table.
More to cook from here. The same rub does Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Baby Back Ribs and Slow Cooker Pulled Pork. For the rest of the table, The OG Mashed Potatoes and Delightful Cranberry Sauce. And if beef is more your Christmas, there is Divine Bovine Christmas Roast.