Home cured bacon

Honestly I'm not even sure what to say about this experience.  It was fun, interesting, exciting, slightly disappointing, and totally worth it all at the same time.  I'm totally glad I did it but not sure if I'd ever do it again.  It has given me a new appreciation for bacon, which I didn't even realize was possible since I already held it in such high regards.

A few things came together at the right time to make this project a possibility.  LJ's sister bid on and won the grand champion hog (a hog is a pig with a penis if you were unaware, something I learned while playing Pictonary over Thanksgiving with my family) and I found out an old friend from high school was running an online shop devoted to all things pork at PigSalt.com.  

When the pig was butchered I asked if they could save the pork belly for me so I could process it in to bacon myself.  Everyone thought I was a little crazy and secretly probably were worried I was going to turn what could be good bacon in to rubbish.  Honestly I was worried too.

I've read about curing bacon at home a number of times and the first step is really easy (as long as you can get your hands on a pork belly).  Basically you rub the pork belly with your cure (pre-purchased or made yourself from one of many good recipes online), place the belly on a cookie sheet, wrap the sheet in plastic, and let it sit in the refrigerator for a week or two.  Some recipes instruct you to flip the belly occasionally and pour off any liquid that builds on the sheet, which I did half way through the week (I couldn't wait two).

When the week is up you rinse off the cure, pat dry the meat, and put it back in the fridge to rest one more day.  Then comes the (slightly) more complicated step of baking/smoking the bacon before it can be fried.

I felt obligated to attempt smoking the bacon even though I don't own a smoker so that I could have the most authentic bacon making experience possible.  After reading about some options online I settled for turning my canning rack upside down on top of a jelly roll pan.  Under the canning rack I placed some foil with wood chips on top.

The bacon went on top of the canning rack and I wrapped the whole thing in more foil to trap in as much smoke as possible.

I then placed the jelly roll pan on top of a hot burner until smoke started to come out of the foil.  You can see the first wisps of smoke if you look at the black dutch oven in the background.

As a back-up in case the smoking experiment went horribly wrong I only put half in the smoking contraption.  The other half got rubbed down with liquid smoke and pepper.

At this point everything went in the oven for about two hours.  I found the unwrapped bacon got up to the appropriate internal temperature without any trouble but the bacon that was in the smoking contraption took a lot longer.  Also very little smoke came out of the contraption so I'm calling that part of the experiment a failure.  I probably could have left the jelly roll pan on the stove top longer to build up more smoke but I didn't want to have to open a window since it was quite cold out when I was doing this.

After the bacon had cooled a bit I sliced off the skin side of the pork bellies and I was left with 8 hunks of bacon, each the equivalent of about one store bought package.

Of all the reading I did about making bacon at home, only one blog mentioned anything about slicing it.  The author went in to a lot of detail about how much of a pain it is, and he was absolutely right.  It is nearly impossible to get even slices and the slices will always be thicker than store bought bacon (not really a bad thing).  Mostly though it takes a lot of time.  Half way through I was wishing I had a deli style meat slicer, but then I'd have to worry about cutting a piece so thin I couldn't even see it.

Obviously after such a long process I couldn't wait to toss a slice in the pan to see how it fried up.  It was as spectacular as you would expect though not exactly what you would expect from bacon.  I may have put too much cure on mine because it was a little on the salty side, and I may not have let the bacon cure as long as I should have because the texture seemed a little spongy (closer to fried SPAM than bacon).

Neither of these things were necessarily bad but it made me realize I may not actually know what bacon is supposed to taste like.  That is one of the problems with being so separated from how our food is grown/raised/processed/cooked.  We don't know what is right or wrong but instead we just know what we are use to.

I shouldn't say we don't know what is right or wrong because our taste buds tell us when something is obviously better or worse than another version (like a store bought tomato versus a home grown tomato).  However it becomes much more complicated when one isn't necessarily better than the other, but just different.

I would argue that this homemade bacon is much better than the vast majority of store bought bacon, but that is probably because I often buy crappy bacon.  This experience taught me that if when I'm going to buy bacon I should spend a few extra dollars and get the really quality stuff.

 The experience was completely worth it, but would I do it again?  If I had a smoker and a meat slicer I would want to give it another shot to see if I could improve on the final product but I don't see either of those things in my future.  Plus, how often am I going to get my hands on a pork belly?

P.S.
Storage of that much bacon presents some problems.  After slicing the slabs it was hard to wrap and store in the freezer.  If I were to do it again I'd probably leave it in the small blocks and move one from the freezer to fridge whenever it was needed.  Or find a vacuum sealer for food storage.