Mark your calendars! One of the country’s most cherished holidays, National Glazed Spiral Ham Day, is only three days away. In honor of the celebration, which comes to us every year on April 15, we thought we’d take a journey and explore what exactly sets our sweet, caramelized, glazed, spiral-sliced ham apart from the rest.
What makes a ham a Honey Baked Ham?
We’ve been serving America’s favorite ham for over 60 years. Its one-of-a-kind flavor has been the source of holiday nostalgia for millions of Americans for decades. Like any food, everyone’s recipe varies depending on preference, resources and ability – but there’s something about the HoneyBaked Ham recipe that earns our ham a place at so many families’ holiday tables. So, how do we do it?
We’re Choosy When it Comes to Quality
From farm to fork, our Quality Assurance team controls every aspect of the inspection, cooking and distribution processes to ensure safety, quality and consistency. Each ham is hand-selected from the highest quality American, grain-fed stock. Every ham is trimmed and prepared by expert manufacturers for the most selective inspection process on the market. Our standards are so stringent that once we’ve completed our 16-point inspection, only about 10% of the hams are selected to be Honey Baked Hams.
We’ve Refined the Cooking Process to an Art
Each Honey Baked Ham is cured for up to 24 hours using a signature process that enhances the flavor of the meat. Because we don’t add any extra water or juices, our hams weigh the same going into the curing process as they do coming out. After curing, our hams spend the next 24 hours smoking over a select blend of hardwood chips, infusing the meat with the rich, smoky flavor our customers love.
As a result of the precision and care of the smoking process, and because our hams are smoked at least twice as long as the industry standard, all Honey Baked Hams are deep mahogany in color and are packed with mouthwatering smoky flavor.
Earning the Gold Foil
After the smoking process, the hams are ready for slicing. They’re loaded onto our spiral slicers, invented by our founder Harry Hoenselaar himself, and rotated to receive one continuous slice – resulting in a uniform thickness for each slice. Then, each ham is cut in half and goes through one final quality assurance inspection to ensure only the most pristine hams make it to the glazing process – the best part!
In-store, our master glazers apply our secret recipe glaze to as many as 60 hams in an hour (in peak season, of course). It can take months of practice to develop the precision and skill necessary to ensure every product has a nearly identical coating of caramelized glaze, resulting in the same delicious flavor and mouthwatering texture every time. Glazing each ham by hand in-store means that our customers get a freshly prepared, hand-crafted product every time. It’s that dedication to quality that earns our place as the centerpiece of our customers’ holiday meals.
Ensuring consistent flavor in all of our high-quality products is what makes our hams HoneyBaked. It’s our commitment to quality in our product and service that keep our customers coming back for their Honey Baked Ham time and time again. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
