Let's Make Bacon! (part 1)

kainzero

United States5211 Posts

May 30 2010 08:09 GMT

Everyone should know about bacon. It's one of the quintessential fatty foods that's managing to make its way into almost every other food. Want to make your food more delicious? Wrap it in bacon! We have bacon-wrapped hot dogs, bacon bits on maple glazed donuts, even bacon chocolate bars. The venerable Double Down sandwich from KFC even features a piece of bacon in it.

While we're all adding bacon to whatever we can get our hands on... have you ever thought about improving the bacon you eat and upgrading from store-bought to homemade? Store-bought bacon isn't exactly the best quality. They inject water in it to double the size and to get more money, since it's sold by weight. Great economically, but slightly confusing when you cook your bacon and come out with half of the original size. The smoked flavor they use isn't really smoke but that fake liquid smoke stuff that gives it an artifical taste.

When you make your own bacon, you won't have these problems. In fact, if you're creative, you can give it an extra bit of punch. You can add different flavors during the curing process, or you can use different woods to smoke. You can source your own pig, so if you're rich enough to buy one of those acorn-fed pigs off the Iberian peninsula (at least $10,000+), hey, you can make some phenomenal bacon.

Just to clarify, we're talking about American bacon. Canadian bacon is virtually the same, only that they use pork loin instead of pork belly, which is much leaner. We're fat Americans so we need our pork belly.

Making bacon is a 3-step process: Curing, smoking, and cooking. We're only gonna cover the first step today.

I don't know what exactly curing is, but what I do know is that it dries it out meat and preserves it. I bought a book on curing but I just use the recipes instead of learning the science.

First, buy a 3-5 lb. pork belly and trim it so that it's nice and square. Unfortunately, I've never done this. I live next to a Korean market, and they have these already trimmed and ready to go, presumably for samgyeopsal. I'm not Korean, but I do buy this for bacon-making purposes. If I were environmentally conscious I would look for some heirloom pig or something and order it from a farm.

You're gonna wanna rinse it and dry it with paper towels.

Next, you need to make the dry cure. The dry cure is 1 part pink salt, 4 parts sugar, 6 parts kosher salt.

What is pink salt? It's salt that has sodium nitrite, which protects you from botulism. It is unfortunately linked to cancer, but as long as you don't eat pink salt products all the time, you should be fine. It's pink so that you don't get confused and accidentally use it as regular salt. You can find it online or purchase it at specialty food stores. You want to make enough to coat your pork belly, I usually use 1/4 cup.

For my bacon, I like adding brown sugar, and I put in half a cup. Pork and sugar go well together.

Put the cure in a large plastic ziploc bag, then add the pork belly. Seal the bag and shake it up, so that you can coat it with the cure. Next, you want to open the bag on one side and let out all the air before sealing it again. Less air means that there is more pork belly in contact with the cure.

When you're done, put it in the refrigerator. You're gonna flip it over every day for a week to redistribute the cure. You should see some liquid come out, and when you flip it over you let the cure work itself again.