Honey Glazed Ham

As a kid, we never had a ham at Christmas, it was something that Rory’s family have introduced to me and I must admit that at first I thought, that is so much ham! They are a bit of a beast, but make a beautiful addition to your feast and last for days afterwards. This particular one is a wild ham from a pig that Rory caught and had a nice wild taste to go with the beautiful smoky flavour from our local butcher’s in-house manuka smoking.

I have developed the recipe for this glaze over the last few years and it just adds that sticky, sweet flavour to the beautiful salty ham. It helps if you can use a honey with a good strong flavour, like a Manuka or even a Thyme honey if you can get hold of some.

Ingredients

½ cup honey

1 cup pineapple juice

1 teaspoon cinnamon powder (or use 2 cinnamon sticks)

3 star anise

2 tablespoons golden syrup

1 teaspoon mustard powder

½ teaspoon ground cloves (or use 10-1 cloves)

½ teaspoon nutmeg

Put all ingredients in a saucepan and simmer on a low-medium heat until reduced by half. It needs to be quite thick, but still pourable. Stir it often so it doesn’t stick or burn. Remove from the heat and remove star anise (and cinnamon sticks and cloves if you have used them).

Score the fat on your ham in a criss cross pattern. Poke cloves in the corners of each square if you wish. Place it in a nice deep oven dish. Pour about half of the glaze over your ham so it gets inside all of the cuts. Bake your ham according to the instructions on it’s packet or the advice of your butcher (cooking time will vary depending on the size of your ham), basting first with the left over glaze, and then the juices from the pan, about every 15 minutes. When the ham is cooked, remove it from the oven, baste it again with the juices from the pan and let it rest for a good 15 minutes before carving, continue basting every 5 minutes as it rests.

Store your leftovers in the fridge in a cotton ham bag.