Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published November 22, 2007 Baked Ham I cannot imagine Thanksgiving without a turkey. But I also cannot imagine it without a ham. It's not just because I like ham. Especially the ham I bake to accommodate my own taste in ham. (It's the root-beer-glazed ham that I get asked about so much, the recipe for which is elsewhere in this newsletter.) It's also because I love the way the house smells when this ham is in the oven. As it is all morning Thanksgiving. And I love the way the early arrivals fight over the black ham--the crusty stuff I cut off at the beginning of the carving, coated with the brown-sugar-and-mustard black crunchy stuff. And I like to contrast of color and flavor with the turkey, even though the two are sliced more or less the same. Yes, a baked ham is a joy. It's a very different thing from the ham we buy in the deli--even though that's realyl what it is. The texture and flavor change completely. Once I found this out the hard way. I didn't bake the ham long enough. It was a bigger ham than I usually used, and I'd forgotten to leave it out overnight to take the chill off. So, even though I got a temperature reading of over 150 degrees with my meat thermometer (the ideal is 160), when I carved the ham you could see a difference in color between the center and the outer two-thirds. In the middle, it was still like the soft, moist ham you get sliced for sandwiches at a deli. At the outside, it had that meaty firmness that comes from baking. The most common baked hams these days are those spiral-sliced jobs you find in specialty ham stores and supermarkets. I've had my share of them (a former employer gave them out at Christmas), but I haven't bought one for years. I like the ones I bake myself better (I think I'm starting with a better ham than the ham shops do). And I think the typical such ham is too sweet and sliced far too thickly. Although I rarely get a chance to sit down and eat with the others on Thanksgiving, so busy am I carving both the turkeys and the ham, I still think it's an acceptable trade-off for the joys of baking my own. Especially that wonderful, all-morning aroma. There's only one thing wrong with a baked ham: getting rid of it. We have historically had forty to fifty people over for Thanksgiving, and everybody who wants some gets a big chunk of ham to take home. This year, we only have about twenty. Let's see how that goes. There are worse problems to have. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com