It Wasn’t Your Imagination: Some Aldi Spiral Sliced Hams Weren’t Sliced Correctly
Hams are one of Aldi’s more popular holiday items. They’re affordable, relatively easy to prepare, and, in our experience, tasty. If you’re looking to feed a crowd, you can do a lot worse than picking up one of the store’s ham options.
Among the varieties of ham Aldi sells, the spiral sliced ones are quite popular. The reason: they make an easy meat even easier. You don’t have to cut them.
Or, at least, you shouldn’t have to cut them.
In the winter of 2024, we read scattered reports on social media of people saying their ham wasn’t fully cut. We also got comments on our own ham posts from shoppers saying the same thing. The cuts, they said, only went in about two inches — not nearly enough to peel them off without doing a lot more cutting.
And then, during a holiday gathering, we saw it for ourselves.
We saw what others did. Instead of being cut deep enough that you could easily peel slices off and set them out to serve, the cuts only went in a couple of inches. That’s great if you want to flip your ham like pages on a book, but not so great if you need to get the ham set out for a house full of guests.
Was it the end of the world? Not for us. We had quality kitchen knives and plenty of time. But it’s still a problem. The spiral cut hams cost more, and shoppers are paying extra money for the convenience. What’s more, not every shopper might have the time or tools in a pinch; that might be a big reason they’re getting the spiral cut.
2024 is the first year we’ve seen this problem, so we can hope it’s a one-time production issue.
I was very confused as to why my ham
Was not cutting easily. I pretty much butchered it. My daughter and husband were here for dinner. 🤷♀️
Better luck next time
Our Aldi Spiral sliced ham was only sort of scored. the markes went about an inch and didn’t go to the bone. For all intents and purposes it was a regular unsliced ham.
This was the first time I bought a ham at Aldi, and in addition to the slice is not being deep enough, at the smaller end of the ham the slices were much thicker as well. I did notice this while putting on the glaze so I was able to slice it more before serving, but the other problem I have with this ham frankly is that it just didn’t taste good. More than a few people in my family pointed that out as well. I won’t be buying them again.
Yup, I had about a three pound chunk of ham that wasn’t sliced at all and what was sliced didn’t make it really deep enough to be table ready…was a great tasting ham after it finally got sliced down.
Christmas was the first time I cooked an Aldi ham. We opted for the boneless half ham since there were only four of us. Only 3/4 of the ham was sliced. The glaze was tasteless and runny. Cooking directions were non-existent, so we ended up having to look online for those. Turns out, the directions we found weren’t correct as we had to increase the temperature and cook time. All that said, the ham itself was tasty and not overly salty. Would buy again.
Cooked our Aldi Honey Glazed Bone-in Spiral Sliced Ham in a Crockpot using a glaze made with the glaze packet included and it was great. Removed the bone before attempting to slice and had a yield of about 4 pounds of thicker slices and some chunks that will go into a pot of baked beans. I just totally ignored the fact that the ham was not fully scored spirally and it worked out just fine. My “Honey” loved it.