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The trouble with cooking a glazed ham is that the recipes often include brown sugar and some sort of fruit juice. If your goal is to reduce sugar intake then a traditional glazed ham is not really a part of your meal planning… until now.
The holidays left me with a sugar hang over and frozen hams just begging to be cooked up. So after searching the internet for hours, I couldn’t really find any recipes that met my need for reduced sugar and only used the minimal amount of spices I happened to have on hand. Therefore, I had to do some creative thinking and came up with the following Recipe
Chili-Lime Ham
Because this recipe only uses a minimal amount of REAL maple syrup, there is NO refined and meets those 21 Day Fix clean eating recommendations. It’s also important to note that unrefined natural sweeteners like maple syrup contain higher levels of beneficial nutrients, antioxidants and phytochemicals than white table sugar or high fructose corn syrup. This glaze has so much flavor and isn’t sticky sweet.
The proportions here are not hot spicy and my kids gobbled this one up.
Ingredients
1 Tbs dark real maple syrup (not Mrs Buttersworth but the REAL stuff. The darker you can get it, the more nutrients)
1 tsp chili powder
1/8 tsp garlic powder
1/8 tsp cumin powder
1/8 tsp red pepper powder
Pinch of salt
1/4 tsp Adobo sauce and half of an Adobo chili sliced (use more if you like it spicy)
1 tsp fresh lime juice
Fresh lime zest
These are the measurements I used to glaze a 3.5 pound ham so increase measurements for a larger ham.
Directions
Bake the ham according to packing instructions. In the last hour of cooking begin to glaze the ham with your glaze mixture. I like to mix the glaze with the ham juices that accumulate in the roasting pan as well and pour that over the ham. Cover ham and continue cooking. Also, I leave my ham uncovered for the last 15 minutes or so of cooking to get a nice “crust” on the ham.