The Best Roaster Ovens for a Ham

Almost every roaster-oven buying guide, including ours, is written around a turkey, and a turkey is a tall, awkward, raw bird you are trying to cook through without drying the breast. A ham is none of those things. It is usually fully cooked already, it is short and dense, and the objective is to warm it evenly and put a glaze on it.

Three consequences. First, capacity stops being the headline number — the vertical clearance a 22-quart pan buys you is clearance a ham does not use. Second, heat evenness matters more, because a dense cylinder warms from the outside in and you do not want the outside leathery before the center arrives. Third, the bottom of the temperature dial becomes genuinely useful, because a ham is the dish most likely to be ready before anyone is hungry.

That is why the ranking on this page is not the same as the ranking on our general roaster oven roundup. Different food, different winner.

Nesco publishes its own instruction for a precooked ham in a roaster oven, and it is the number to work from rather than anything improvised: preheat the roaster to 325°F, allow 15 to 20 minutes per pound, and take it to an internal temperature of 160°F, basting or glazing during the last 30 minutes.

What that works out to in practice:

• 6 lb half ham — roughly 1 hour 30 minutes to 2 hours at 325°F.
• 8 lb ham — roughly 2 to 2 hours 40 minutes.
• 10 lb ham — roughly 2 hours 30 minutes to 3 hours 20 minutes.
• 12 lb bone-in ham — roughly 3 to 4 hours.

Those are arithmetic on the published per-pound figure, not separate claims, and the thermometer overrules all of them. Pull it at 160°F internal wherever that lands. Glaze goes on in the last half hour, not at the start — sugar put on three hours early burns.

Preheat properly. A roaster oven takes a while to come up and the per-pound figure assumes it is already at temperature when the joint goes in. Switch it on before you do anything else.

Use the rack. A ham sitting directly on the pan base stews in its own liquid and the underside goes gray. The rack lifts it into the circulating heat, and a rack with detachable handles is the difference between lifting a hot joint out cleanly and reaching in with a tea towel.

Add a little liquid, keep the lid on. Half an inch of water, cider or stock in the base, lid closed. The self-basting lid drips condensation back down, which is what stops the surface drying out over three hours.

Glaze last, lid off. Brush the glaze on in the final 30 minutes and take the lid off so it sets rather than steams. If you want real color, the same broiler trick that crisps turkey skin works here: five minutes under your wall oven’s broiler once the ham is up to temperature.

Use a real thermometer rather than the dial — see our thermometer picks and the probe placement guide, which applies to a ham just as much as a bird.

Ham is the dish that waits. It is ready early, it carves easily cold, and it is almost always the thing still sitting out when people come back for seconds. Both of those facts run into the same rule: hot food has to stay at or above 140°F, and the 40°F-to-140°F range is where bacteria multiply. Two hours out on a counter is the limit.

A roaster whose dial reaches down to 125°F handles the afternoon gracefully — glazed ham in, lid on, dial low, carve from it whenever people drift back. If your roaster will not go that low, move the carved slices to a warming tray or a chafing dish instead of leaving them on a board.

Afterwards, the roaster is also the best thing in the kitchen for bringing the leftovers back without turning them to rubber — see how to reheat holiday leftovers.

For a ham alone, 18 quarts is enough for anything a home cook buys. A spiral-cut half ham is typically 6 to 10 pounds, a whole bone-in ham 12 to 18 pounds, and the limiting dimension is diameter rather than height — all of which an 18-quart cookwell takes.

Go to 22 quarts for one of two reasons: you want vegetables roasting in the same pan underneath the joint, or the same appliance has to handle a large turkey in November. If it is the turkey driving the decision, read what size roaster oven you need and buy for the bird, because the ham will fit in whatever the turkey chose.