How to Buy a Ham
Whether it’s for Easter or Christmas dinner or just a big family gathering, nothing is easier to make or pleases a crowd quite like a baked ham. Since hams are sold fully cooked, the heavy lifting has already been done for you. All you need to do is warm it up, slice, and serve. In fact, the most complicated part may actually be the shopping.
What is a ham? At its most basic, it’s a hind leg of pork, and it can be salt-cured, brine-cured, smoked, air-dried, aged, cooked, or some combination of all of those. Ham can be prepared in numerous ways, but for the traditional ham, you’ll want one that’s been cured with a brine, then smoked and fully cooked. These are called city hams, as opposed to uncooked country hams, which are cured by rubbing the meat directly with salt and sugar. Pretty much all the cooked hams you see in the supermarket are going to be city hams.
Most producers today brine their hams by injecting them with a curing solution of water, salt, sugar, and usually phosphates and nitrites as well. The amount of water in the ham determines its grade, which you’ll find on the label.
The two highest grades of ham are sold as either whole or half hams. For up to 14 people, a half-ham is sufficient.
The butt half is the upper part of the ham. Its meat tends to be very tender and flavorful – but it often contains part of the hip bone, which makes carving a little awkward. The shank half is the lower part of the ham. It’s easier to carve, but because the muscles in this region get more exercise, this cut is tougher and chewier.
I prefer bone-in hams over boneless. I find that any meat cooked on the bone has better flavor, and in the case of ham, it also has better texture. When producers remove the bone from a ham, they have to then reshape the meat (in a machine called a vacuum tumbler) so it won’t fall apart when sliced. This can give boneless ham a bit of a spongy texture. And there’s one more reason I like bone-in hams: the leftover bone is great for flavoring soups, beans and other dishes. If you can only find boneless ham, try to pick one that has the natural shape of the leg, which indicates that it was minimally tumbled.
“Spiral-cut” hams are partially boned hams that have been sliced before packaging. I don’t recommend them because they tend to dry out when baked, and they often come already coated with a commercial-tasting glaze.