Monday Munchies: Baked Pepper Jelly Ham

Baked Pepper Jelly Ham is a wonderful company meal, Sunday dinner, or a family meal on those nights when you just feel like fixing something special.

I use a fully-cooked ham.  If you use a “raw ham,” add 20 minutes per pound to the baking time.

Ingredients:

One fully-cooked ham  (for five people, I use a ham that weighs about 3 pounds)

One 5-ounce jar of Pineapple Habanero Pepper Jelly

cloves, if your family likes cloves

What to do:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

If your ham is wrapped in plastic, be sure to remove all of this coating.

Place unwrapped ham in a roaster or dutch oven, and cover.

Bake for about an hour.  Your ham is already fully cooked, so all you’re really doing is getting it really hot.

After an hour’s baking, remove the roaster/Dutch oven and set it on top of the stove.  Take a VERY sharp knife (I recommend our Messermeister knives) and score the top into squares, diamonds, triangles, or whatever design you like.  Just make sure your design is “fancy” enough to give the glaze some “cling.”  Spread the pepper jelly all over the ham, even the sides.  Return to the oven and bake another half hour or so, until the pepper jelly glaze glistens.

Remove ham from the oven and let it “set” for another half hour before you try to slice it.

If you’re serving four or five people with this recipe, you can count on a few slices leftover for someone’s lunch the next day.  If I have a can of shredded pineapple, I sometimes mix that with pepper jelly.

That sweet/hot flavor just permeates the ham and turns it into something so good, there are just no words to properly describe it.  You’ll never glaze a ham with brown sugar again.

My son is the only one of us who likes cloves on this ham, so I usually just stick a few on one of the ham ends.  The rest of us just like the pepper jelly glaze on ours.  But ham is big, so there’s plenty of room to “individualize” it a bit.  🙂