Baking ham

Ham is traditionally reserved for special occasions, especially for Christmas and New Year dinner. Last December, I experimented with glazing and after a couple of tries, I have one which I (and others who had the amazing opportunity to taste it) am happy with.

My glazing recipe involves mixing equal parts in volume of sweetened fruit juice (pineapple with some peach is good) and beer, plus a couple of heaping tablespoons of honey.  In my glazing batch, I had half a bottle of beer, that should help out with measurements.  And as you can see in the photos, I stuck some peach and pineapple on top of the ham to help flavour it along (but if you have pure juice in cans, don't sweat it).

I got the beer idea online.  Some people used pure beer as their glaze so I tried it in one of my experiments but the ham tasted strongly of beer, and was not as pleasant as I imagined.  So I came up with my own recipe, but still with beer added. :-)

I baked the ham at 180˚C for a little under an hour, and every ten minutes I basted it with the glaze.  Make sure that the ham's fatty part is on top, so that when it cooks, it melts off into the meat, flavouring the ham further.  Also, place the ham on top of a baking rack so that the bottom part will not get soaked up in glaze during baking; the flavour on that part will be too strong (and that is based from experience!)

And that, is my not-so secret glaze recipe (which friends had been asking for; sorry it took a couple of months before I finally got it posted!).

If you want to know more about baking ham, I found this information from yellow.co.nz (yes, it's the phone directory!) very informative.