My family is partial to honey baked ham and not the kind you make yourself, the kind you order from a catalog or pick up from a very specific store. THE Honey Baked Ham. But every once in a while it’s good to try out new things, so I convinced them that we should give a different kind of ham a whirl, one that’s equally sweet but has a fruity punch and a caramelized brown sugar flavor. That would be this Brown Sugar Pineapple Ham and while we might never fully give up our honey-baked variety, I can promise you that this one will definitely be in the ham rotation from here on out.

You can use either a regular bone-in ham for this or a spiral cut one. But you want the flavor to get all the way down into the meat, so if you’re using an un-cut ham, the first step you want to take is scoring the ham in a cross hatch pattern. Just take a sharp knife and make cuts diagonally about one inch apart and a quarter inch deep all over the top of the ham. Then you’re going to bake the ham. But you’re going to bake it in an awful lot of goodness.

You’ll pull the sauce together in a saucepan, which is just a matter of simmering some brown sugar, pineapple tidbits and their juice, Dijon mustard, and some ground cloves until the mixture has thickened. Then you’ll brush that sauce allllll over the ham, taking care to get it down into the cuts you made. And then you bake.

You’re really only heating the ham through and rendering some of the fat, so ninety minutes or so should do it, but make sure to stop by the oven every half-hour or so and brush the ham again with the glaze. By the end it should be sticky and caramelized and delicious. It’s an easy enough thing to make, but so deserving of a special occasion.