Year of the Pig

People just love bacon, and who can blame them. People always say that everything is better with bacon, but what about better bacon? After reading the bacon recipe in the Charcuterie book, I was really surprised how easy it looked to make this magical food. The only unusual items you need are “pink salt” and pork belly. The pink salt is a mixture of salt and 6.25% sodium nitrite which you do not want to eat by itself despite its candy like appearance! It is used to kill bacterias including botulism when curing meats. This is cheap and pretty easy to find, and I ordered it online. As for pork belly, chances are you aren’t gonna find it readily. You will have to look around and probably need to speak to your butcher about ordering it. My friend Kat ended up getting this slab from a fancy New York meat market for $4.99/lb, but it was nothing special; my local supermarket can get it cheaper, like $1.50/lb. One of these days, I would like to try it from a heritage or farm raised pig, where prices get more expensive, more like $9.99/lb, and is most likely thicker and fattier than its factory counterpart. As for selecting a pork belly, I would say get one that looks like bacon! Also, this bacon recipe calls for boneless, rind on pork belly.

Like I said, this is a really easy recipe. I was really eager to try it, especially after seeing this documentation from a very interesting blog which followed the exact same recipe from the Charcuterie book. The results looked wonderful!

The first thing is to mix up the basic dry cure: 1 pound of kosher salt, 8 oz. of sugar, and 2 oz. of the pink salt. Whew, that was hard!

Then I poured about 1/2 cup of the curing mixture (the recipe calls for 1/4 cup) onto a baking pan, spread it out and liberally covered the pork belly, coating it on as thick as I could. The book talks about the endless variety of bacon flavors you can add at this stage, and suggests 2 directions. One direction is the more traditional breakfast bacon which is sweetened with something like maple syrup. The other direction is to take it in a more savory direction using something like garlic, pepper and crushed bay leaves. I elected for the sweeter variety, so after coating the bacon with the curing mixture and putting it in a large 2 gallon ziploc, I added about 1/2 cup of maple syrup, which seemed to pretty much liquefy the salt immediately.

And that is pretty much it for now. Next, you just put it in the fridge for about 7 days, or until the pork belly feels firm and not squishy, turning the belly over every other day always keeping it in contact with the liquid. I ended up keeping mine in the bag for about 8 days, then took it out and let it sit uncovered in the fridge overnight to make it a little tacky and get it ready for the next step: smoking.

If you don’t have a smoker, never fear, you can still make great bacon by just cooking it in the oven at this point, but certainly the smoker is gonna add a lot of great flavor to the bacon, and of course that’s what I had to do. I got out the weber bullet smoker and lit a fire with some plum wood as my smoke wood. Then I slapped the pork belly on and let it smoke for a couple hours turning it over a couple times until the bacon had reached and internal temperature of 150 degrees, and had acquired the most delicious looking smoky color.

The final step now was to remove the rind. The book recommends doing this while the bacon is still hot, and I would agree; it sliced off very easily with a large knife. Then I cut up the bacon into manageable sizes, let it cool and wrapped it in plastic wrap, freezing some and tossing the rest in the the fridge. The book says that it will keep refrigerated from 7-10 days and will keep in the freezer for about 3 months.

Of course the moment I had been waiting a more than a week for was here: time to eat some bacon. I was not disappointed, believe me. The maple syrup cut through very prominently and mixed with the delicious smoke flavor. The intensity of the bacon flavor was way better than anything you get in the store. If you are a fan of bacon this recipe is worth the time it takes, the end result far surpassed anything you are gonna be able to buy in the supermarket. I will be making more!