Better Bacon
If you've seen my FB or Instagram, you probably noticed a lot of bacon. Yeah, I like bacon. Supermarket bacon (Big Bacon), even the better stuff just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Watching the episode of "How It's Made" and seeing it, injecting flavoring, and big business pork production just made it unappetizing. I wanted better meat, better ingredients and better flavor. You can get some artisan bacon online, but they’re pretty pricey. Yeah, like prime beef tenderloin crazy. So, I decided to start making my own. It’s not that hard, but does take some time.
Belly: Finding top quality pork bellies has become a continual task. There seems to be no consistency. Oh well, I keep finding good ones, just ain't easy.
Cure: Like the bellies, I tried a few cures before I found the one I like. I decided on a dry cure with a mix of salt, turbinado sugar, black pepper, celery seed, hatch pepper powder & curing salt. With refrigeration, we don’t have to worry about spoilage and poisoning, but sodium nitrite adds part of the flavor I enjoy. Curing is also about pulling out the moisture from the belly. This take about 5 days of hand rubbing the cure mixture in every day. My bellies sit on a rack in the fridge, no hanging and stretching like Big Bacon (even artisan ones). When the pan quits having drippings, it’s ready to smoke.
Flavoring: Before smoking the cure has to be washed off cuz that much salt would be pretty nasty later on. I usually, but not always, add a little rub to flavor the surface. Green hatch pepper powder is my go-to rub, but I try others frequently, chipotle, red hatch, cajun, black pepper, brown sugar, etc.
Smoke: A big deviation from Big Bacon is my smoking process. Here I’m doing a hot smoke, actually cooking the belly. Smoking with mesquite and hickory at 250°-300° for 2 hours provides a hefty flavoring. Go Bold! or go home. That first cut right off the smoker is a one of a kind experience.
Slicing: Everyone has their preferences on thickness. Big Bacon does 1/16” for normal and 1/8” for thick cut. I prefer 3/16” but my wife likes it 1/8”. Luckily I have a nice new slicer to dial them both in.
Cooking: Yes, the bacon is already cooked to 150°-170° and ready to eat. But most people want to fry it up, searing it and rendering the fat to their liking. For me, I start with a hot skillet or griddle and flip a couple times a minutes for 2-4 minutes.
This was my first batch of bacon. Oct 2016
I've come a long way since then. No wet curing, no wood chips in a foil packet, no more halving it to fit the slicer. But I'm still using the same pit.
