Soaking a Christmas Ham Before Cooking

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to cook a ham. Okay now for our first step. Actually technically our first step is going to be heating the oven up to four hundred, to five hundred degrees. So you should do that first thing before you start anything else. Our next step is going to be to take our ham, which I have already taken the liberty of taking it out of the package and rinsing it off. If you haven't, you might want to do that first. Unless you buy a fresh ham that isn't you know, like if you go to a butcher shop and buy it. But since this came in a little plastic wrapper and everything, I went ahead and took it and rinsed it off and gave it a little bath. So, step one; put the ham in the pot and this is where things get complicated, so you want to pay attention. Follow me here. This is really difficult stuff. Step two; turn the cold water on. That's the end of the preparation process for the ham. What we're going to do is we're going to cover it with cold water and you're going to want to let it sit for at least two and a half hours but preferably eight hours, overnight would be nice. If you're going to do it overnight, you want to soak it in the fridge, you don't want to leave it at room temperature. Unless your house is forty degrees, in which case that is completely acceptable. So we're going to submerge my ham here and we're going to let it sit for eight hours. I'm going eight hours so and one thing is, see how the ham looks like it doesn't fit quite right? If you turn it and this is important too for cooking it, turn it cut side down. Then it will fit just fine. So just a little more water there. And it is good to go. This ham is going to soak in this water for eight hours and we will come back in eight hours and throw it in the oven so. And actually it should be noted if you're going to do this for eight hours, your first step would be to preheat the oven. That would be actually, you'd do this first, then preheat the oven, but since I'm going to through the magic of television, you'll understand in a second."