Alton Brown’s City Ham

This is a recipe review, which means this is a recipe that I did not personally come up with, but that I tried out and am giving my opinion on how the recipe turned out. For legal reasons I cannot post these recipes, but I can tell you where you can get them yourself.

Yesterday for my Easter dinner I gave Alton Brown’s recipe for city ham a try. In case you don’t know what a city ham is, check out my post on the different types of ham. This recipe has you applying a crust to that ham that is made up of dark brown sugar, brown mustard, and ginger snap cookies. Yes I said ginger snap cookies. You turn them into dust in your food processor and apply them to the ham in the final hour of cooking. Here are my notes from making this recipe.

Click here for the recipe.

1. I used a shank end city ham, like Alton picked out in the show.
2. The only ingredient I left out was the bourbon spray. I found that my ginger snap cookies stuck to the ham really well without the need for any additional liquid.
3. The basting brush worked well to get the mustard layer on the ham.
4. I used my probe thermometer to tell when the ham had reached 130 degrees, so I knew when it was time to put on the crust.
5. We carved the ham up using an electric knife, which made the job really easy.

This ham was delicious. My wife wanted to try this recipe because she isn’t really into ham, but like the idea of the crust. The crust came out perfect and she did indeed love it! I didn’t really have any problems with this recipe. It was rather simple and good.

Recipe Grade: A

Click here for the recipe.