Episode XVI: Ham for Thanksgiving

Well.... it was going to be for Thanksgiving, but it turned out a few of the folks headed over to Riff Raffs for dinner were Muslim, so maybe ham wasn't such a good idea. Therefore, a couple days later I fired up the cooker and made a double smoked ham following a recipe off the the Weber virtual bullet site.

I was intrigued because I've sometimes felt that ham comes out too dry and I didn't want to make that worse by smoking it for a couple hours. This recipe had an injection that the author raved about. Quite complicated and lots of different flavors, from butter pecan, to rum, vanilla, amaretto and orange. When ever someone commented about making a substitution, they were quickly scolded on the forum and told that perfection came with precision. Let me say first that it was HARD to find all the stuff. Ugh, eventually had to order a couple things online. And then, boy, was it messy. I wrapped it up in saran wrap as suggested, but stuff still leaked out all over the place, squirted out of other holes and was just sticky, sticky.

I eventually got it done, then trimmed off a lot of the fat and scored the sides. The idea here was since the ham was already cured and cooked, then I was afraid that the flavor wouldn't seep in so I scored the whole outside and removed the fat so flavor would get right to the meat. Don't you hate it when you buy a honey baked ham and all that good flavor gets stuck to a giant piece of fat that would make you barf if you ate it? That wasn't going to happen to me. I scored it, glazed it and smoked it.

The glaze came from the same recipe. Not the usual brown sugar / pineapple sort of thing. Nothing wrong with that, but this one was a little different which also appealed to me. Not quite as sweet as some of them.


Check out the results!

Do you hate it when you get a piece of that white ham fat running through the center of our slice? I do. I've lost the link, but I found an alternative way to slice the ham. Instead of simply slicing from the top down to the bone, this has you coming in from the side and slicing out big chunks by following the lines of fat. A little messy, but you got some nice large chunks that you could then set on a cutting board and slice nicely. Much easier to eat.

My thoughts for next time:

• This was the moistest ham I'd ever had. But was it the smoker or the injection? Not sure.
• Sometimes I got a burst of vanilla or run flavor in the meat. Definitely not right. If I used the injection again (not sure that I would) then would cut back on both of those flavors.
• The glaze was excellent. Formed a nice crust and great flavor. Would definitely do that again.