Brown Sugar–Mustard Glazed Ham

The stakes are high when you’re making a holiday-worthy brown sugar–mustard glaze for ham. A baked ham takes a long time to cook, which is nerve-wracking when you have guests in the next room, hungrily eyeing each other over the remains of a cheese platter. And then there’s the ham itself: when done properly, the best ham is moist, both sweet and salty, tender and irresistible. When not done properly...it’s the opposite.

This glazed ham recipe will take the stress out of your Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter main dish, because it includes a few nifty tricks designed to stave off these potential issues. Buying the ham with the rind on provides a type of insurance against dryness, as does cooking it under a protective blanket of parchment paper and foil. Once your holiday ham is cooked through, cut off the skin to reveal the delicious fat underneath, which renders more easily once you cut it into a diamond pattern (also, it looks cool—might as well awe those guests). Finally, the brown-sugar-mustard glaze recipe is a simple concoction that caramelizes on top, leaving a crisp, flavorful edge that people will fight over.

This honey–mustard glazed ham rests for a generous 45 minutes before carving, which offers the host time to sort out side dishes—or simply sit down for a few minutes. The shank end of the ham is easier to carve than the butt end, so you’re not performing surgery just before eating, either.

Read our guide to cooking ham for more tips and tricks.