My husband decided he wanted to make bacon. We had been eating a lot of it lately in pastas and at breakfast, and well, what meat-eater doesn’t like bacon?
It turns out that making bacon is easy. It takes a little bit of time, but it’s really not hard at all, and well worth the effort.
On top of that, making your own bacon is fairly frugal. Good bacon–the thick-cut, apple- or hickory-smoked, lower-fat bacon–costs about $6-$8 a pound. Our bacon ended up being around $3 a pound, and I would say it is as good as most of the fancy stuff from the grocery story. This being our first time making it, we did not shop around for cheaper prices, but I am certain we can cut that price down even further in the future.
Of course, if you are content with the stringy $1/pound bacon, then you are not going to come out ahead on price here. However, you will come out ahead on quality.
Bacon is made from the belly of the pig.
(Courtesy)
We bought the belly from our local grocery store. We asked at the butcher counter and it turned out they had an 8 pound belly in the back that they were willing to sell us for $2/pound. That sounded okay to us, so we ended up with a long thick slab of belly, complete with the pork skin still on it.
We also used “pink salt,” a curing salt otherwise known as sodium nitrite. You use pink salt in meat curing to prevent botulism. A pound of pink salt costs $2.50. (More on sodium nitrite here.)
Aside from that, it was just a matter of time–9 days to be exact–plus seasoning, heat, and smoke until we had bacon.
A couple of notes before I give the recipe. First of all, we adapted the recipe from Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. I really can’t say enough about how awesome this book is. If you are interested at all in curing meats, go out and buy it.
Secondly, we used our smoker to make the bacon. According to Charcuterie, if you don’t have a smoker, you can use the oven, although of course then the bacon won’t be smoked. Check out the book for more information if you’re interested.
Okay enough talking.
How To Make Your Own Smoked Bacon
Ingredients:
(in this case, it is more accurate to weigh the ingredients, so get out the kitchen scale)
1 8 pound pork belly
75 grams (approx. 3 oz) kosher salt
18 grams (approx. 3 tsp) pink salt
75 grams (approx. 3/8 cup) packed dark brown sugar
90 milliliters (approx. 2 1/10 cup) maple syrup
Equipment:
Kitchen scale
1-2 3-gallon ziploc plastic bags
Smoker
Wire rack
Meat thermometer
A good sharp knife
Directions:
First, trim excess meat from either end of the pork belly so it is a rectangle. I froze the excess as pork belly is wonderful to cook with.
Create the cure. Combine all the ingredients together in a bowl. Rub the cure over the meat side of the belly. (There’s no point in rubbing it on the skin since you are just going to cut it off.) Put the whole thing in a big ziploc bag and put it in the fridge.
Now, you wait. It takes about a week (we waited 8 days) for the cure to penetrate the meat. Every day, flip the bag over so that the cure is redistributed. During this time, you will notice liquid leeching out of the belly. This means the salt is doing its job.
After a week, remove the belly from the fridge. Congratulations, you have just made fresh bacon. If you want, you can slice a little off and fry it up–it’s good. It tastes like pork belly.
But we want to make smoked bacon, so onward! Next, rinse the cure off the pork belly:
And then set it on a wire rack. Put the belly, uncovered and meat-side-up, in the fridge overnight. During this time, a pellicle will form over the meat, which is a gooey film that comes from the salt cure pulling water out of the meat. This is an important step because the pellicle helps the smoke penetrate the meat.
The next day, you finally get to smoke the bacon. We used almond wood instead of traditional apple or hickory wood because that is what we had lying around. My husband smoked the whole pork belly at around 185-190F for about 2 hours, until the thickest part of the belly registered 150F on the meat thermometer.
After it cools, remove the skin off the belly. This is the hardest part because it requires you to cut along the line where the skin meets the fat of the belly. Using a knife, carefully slice the skin off, trying not to remove the fat in the process. Discard the skin.
What you have left is a nice slab of freshly smoked bacon!
We ended up with 5 pounds of bacon after the skin was removed. It is much leaner than the stuff in the store–I ended up needing a bit of oil to cook it, which is a first for bacon. It is neither too sweet nor too salty, just the right amount of crispy, and very delicious:
My husband says that the only thing he would do differently next time is to divide the pork belly in half because that would have been easier to work with. Otherwise, I would say our bacon adventure is a success.
