Smoking a Ham

Been wanting to do this for a long time but was unprepared when I had to.

Had to put down my errant hog, sigh. He decided he didn't need to stay inside the electric fence any longer and animal control was giving me grief because he'd wandered off and was bothering neighbors. How much trouble can a 300 pound (136kg) hog get into anyway. He only knocked over a few planters and rooted up a bunch of grass and bushes - you know, just ordinary pig stuff.

Step 1: My First Home Smoked Ham and First Instructable

It can't get any simpler!
I had planned on making a smoker but the fates intervened and I had to quickly improvise. I had an old gas oven that, fortunately, I hadn't disposed of. I thought, a smoker is just a box, right? So, I setup the oven in a safe area outside and hooked up a BBQ propane tank and scattered a few cups of hickory sawdust (20 kilos for $10!) on the oven floor. I placed the rack with the 22lb/10kg cured ham in the center position and set the thermostat to 330 degrees F (165 C) and fired it up at 11am and it was done by 5:30, I thought it would take longer. Kinda disrupted dinner plans because my Mom had planned left overs - we ate ham instead. The temperature I used was not enough to ignite the sawdust and made copious amounts of smoke. I replenished the sawdust as required and left it alone to cook. Oh yeah, turned it over a couple times. You can see the finished temp. in degrees F and C. The thermometer was pushed to the center of the ham so it's core temp. No pics of the oven, everyone knows what an oven looks like.