Plan B.  My original plan (Plan A) after this past weekend was to report back to you my detailed and hugely successful and tasty recipe for smoking a ham.  Not so much.

You most likely do not recall my post from three years ago (2015) about the ham I prepared and  smoked for Easter, but I decided to try my luck again this year – with a different smoker and formula.

While originally headed out of town for Easter, plans changed and I decided to smoke a fresh ham at home on my new wood offset smoker.  If you saw my previous post on smoking, you will remember I had enormous success smoking a rack of lamb and some success smoking a chicken on the new smoker.

I felt confident I could produce the best-ever smoked ham for Easter this year.  I mixed 2-3 recipes together to come up with this formula.  Maybe this was the problem (the analogy of too many chefs in the kitchen?), but I felt confident.

The entire process was arduous, although if the ham had turned out well I would have been the first to praise these efforts.  I let the ham soak overnight in a brine, let it marinate in a juice concoction, got up at 4 am on Sunday morning and injected the ham with an apple juice mixture before smoking, basted it during the cook, applied a glaze… my mouth was salivating.  I thought – OK, this is IT!

Well… let me just say it was a fun effort, and I am reminded smoked meats can be unbelievably great… or in this case, not so much.  The ham didn’t taste bad, but it was dry and it certainly didn’t pack the flavors that I was hoping it would deliver.

I will forego sharing my recipe, since obviously it was not a “keeper”.  But I will keep at it, and hope to bring you future smoking successes, tips and tricks.

Carry on.