I had an epiphany yesterday while eating this year’s Christmas ham. A ham-piphany, if you will.
I’ve always found ham underwhelming. Not bad - I don’t dislike it - just…meh. Ham is ham. I’ve always assumed this is because I haven’t had good ham. After all there’s a world of difference between a bad steak and a great steak, or even, I would argue, between a badly done turkey and a good turkey. So this year, for Christmas, I thought we’d try doing a ham using a recipe that my brother-in-law tried and loved. I trust his opinion on food. Like pretty much all ham recipes, it involved mixing up a bunch of tasty stuff and sticking it to the outside of the ham while it cooked.
So I made it, which took a fair bit of effort, but less than a turkey would have, and ate it. And it was good, I suppose. The outside bits were certainly yummy enough, but the ham itself - the meat without any outside bits - just tasted like ham. Plain old ham.
And that’s when it hit me. Ham is just ham. There’s no big difference between good ham and bad ham. All ham recipes involve figuring out interesting ways to slap stuff that actually tastes good onto the ham - glazes, spices, fruit, cookie crumbs, what have you - instead of actually flavoring the ham itself. It’s not that I’m missing out on anything - I just don’t particularly care for ham, which is odd, because pork in pretty much any other form is amazing.
I suppose my quest to find an amazingly awesome ham recipe that will cause me to drop my fork and say “Holy crap this is good ham” is at an end. Closure.
I like ham, but it’s way below a turkey or a good beef entree for me. We’re doing ham this evening for Xmas dinner only because we have some guests who may or may not have been able to show up. Our usual Xmas dinner is a killer bone-in standing rib roast, but I neither wanted to come up short nor buy an expensive extra length given the variability of the attendance.
I do find a good mustard-garlic rub adds to a ham. But you’re right… ham is ham, and within extremes it’s all just… ham.
There is a wider range of traditional products that people traditionally enjoy during the Christmas period in areas of Eastern Europe. See some for yourself here or here.
OTOH, I love ham, and would hazard a guess that the OP and the others have never had a good country ham. All they’ve had is the current water-logged commercial crap.
I love ham. A local meat processor/locker makes ham so good it should be dessert. My mom used to bake a bone-in ham and that was excellent too.
But the hams in the store – water added hams – no matter how expensive they are, they all taste the same and have very little flavor. All I taste is the salt.
I get a salt cured Smithfield ham when I go home to Virginia for visits. Soak it overnight to remove most of the salt, cook it, slice thin on fresh buttered biscuits. Heaven.
I also cut off a thick slice or two before cooking the ham. Fry it up for breakfast with biscuits and grits and eggs.
And never, ever, EVER get a spiral sliced piece of mass market shit ham. Get a good bone in ham that has as little messing with as possible [Smithfield is my preferred brand, but our local butchers shop processes their own pigs and makes killer hams and thick slab cut bacon.]
We like to cut generous steaks off the smithfield ham and soak it in water to remove any excess salt and fry them up with a dab of reserved bacon fat, and make red eye gravy, biscuits, scrambled eggs, portion everything out and enjoy. The richness of a good ham makes the tiny size of basically a deck of cards seem like a lot of ham. Though I will admit that paper thin slices of smithfield ham on biscuits is a great brunch item.
There is definitely a difference between a well-cured and smoked ham from a heritage hog breed and some mass-market, cure-pumped and liquid-smoke marinated ham you buy at the grocery.
I made a 9 lb ham from an uncured Berkshire ham roast (part of an uncured pig leg)- cured it in a brown sugar, salt & sodium nitrite brine for 7 days, and smoked it for about 6 hours with applewood.
Definitely different than your average spiral sliced ham.
If you have a deli or supermarket somewhere nearby that sells Boar’s Head meats, get them to cut you a slice of Sweet Slice ham. You will thank me. That is what it’s supposed to taste like. No junk on the outside, just amazingly flavorful meat.
I’ve always disliked ham as a main meal. I like it on its own as a snack/appetizer/beer or wine food when its dry-cured. I like it as an ingredient. I like wet-cured ham on sandwiches. But I’ve never enjoyed a roasted cured ham as a main dish.
See, that’s delicious to me. A thinly sliced piece of a well-cured ham. It’s the ham roast or ham steaks I don’t like. I love ham, but for a good ham, a little goes a long way. To me, it feels like sitting down to eat a block of cheese for dinner. It’s something that’s best as an accent to other foods or eaten in small portions.
I’m the opposite of the OP. I like ham (and bacon. And pork sausage if it’s the right kind.) but really dislike pork qua pork. I make my partner cook up some kielbasa in the slow cooker with the pork and sauerkraut on New Years because I don’t like the pork.
There is a significant difference between good ham and bad ham, greater in my experience than the difference between good turkey and bad turkey. But the difference isn’t in how you prepare it in the kitchen. Good ham must start off as good ham.
Of course ham itself is what would otherwise be “pork roast” if it hadn’t been treated and cured. As mentioned upthread, by the time it’s ham it’s as good (or not) as it’s going to get.
True dat. I suffered from Ham Apathy for many years, and was unenthused to learn that ham was my man friend’s plan for Xmas dinner. But lo, a miracle! It came to pass that he bought some kind of wonderful, magical ham, and verily it was anointed with brown sugar and mustard, and baked for many hours. And when it was brought forth, there was rejoicing across the land (or at least the table).
Yes YES YES! I have appropriated several pieces of the magical ham for this very purpose.
Exactly. I’ll often fry a slice to serve with breakfast, but the only ham I serve as a main course with dinner is fresh (green) and cooked in the oven or smoker for most of the day. It isn’t what most people think of as ham.
