Costco sells full pork belly at what seems like a very good price (3.99 per lb). This is a skin on belly. The skin is edible and, although I've never had skin on bacon, it is reported as producing a nice bit of crispness when left on for bacon. I intend to leave it on for this first attempt. I picked up a 13 lb belly and will be preparing half of it for this first attempt (and will freeze the remainder for later).
My plan is to salt the belly with 1% salt (equilibrium method) and store it in the fridge for a week for the salt to absorb. I will then add spices (will do 2 different spice mixes to evaluate the differences) and then wrap and dry them in my temperature controlled curing chamber/cheese cave until they have lost 15-20% of their water weight. This drying will help protect the meat from pathogens (like Listeria). I will then cold smoke the meat for 10-12 hrs. There is much discussion about nitrates being needed to ward off botulism pinioning. Botulism requires an anaerobic environment to create spores - I have confirmed that my smoker does not create an anaerobic environment by setting up candles in the smoker - the candles have enough oxygen to continually burn during smoking. So, based on this, I feel comfortable that I am not creating a botulism risk by smoking the bacon.
My intention will be to cook the bacon up crispy in small batches and then use it on my nightly salad (goes very nicely with avocado and blue cheese)
Ingredients:
- Version 1:
- 1333g of pork belly
- 14g of salt (1%)
- 2 tsp Black Pepper
- 1 tsp Garlic Powder
- 1 tsp Chipotle Pepper Powder
- Version 2:
- 1310g of pork belly
- 14 g of salt (1%)
- Splash of Balsamic Vinegar
- 2 tsp Brown Sugar
- 1 tsp Paprika
- 1 tsp Black Pepper
Process Details:
- 11/1/24
- Got a large pork belly from costco and cut it into 4 pieces of roughly equal size. I am going to use two of these today
- Measured the weights of the belly and salted the meat side at 1% by weight
- Put these in 1 gal zip-lock bags and stored them in the fridge for the salt to absorb. I evaluated the progress every couple days after this
- 11/9/24
- The meat surface was fairly dry after a week in the fride which indicated to me that the salt had been drawn in
- I spiced the meat, wrapped it up in muslin sacks and trussed it up with string to hang in the curing chamber
- Collected the starting weight for the drying (I'm looking to lose 15-20% of the water weight). Version 1 was 1360g and Version 2 was 1340g
- Moved to the curing chamber set between 50 and 60 F. It is sitting at about 60-80% humidity with the meat in it
- 11/15/24
- One week later the meat had dried to within my target: Version 1 was down to 1133g (17% weight loss) and Version 2 was 1119g (17% weight loss)
- I moved them back to the fridge over night to smoke them the next day
- 11/16/24
- Set the bacon up on a rack in my trash can smoker. I used hickory wood chips in my soldering iron based cold-smoke generator. I started at 6 PM anticipating a night in the low 40 to high 30 F range
- Added a temperature monitor just for curiosity
- I smoke with a lid on, of course, but it is slightly ajar. The smoke generator produces a good amount of very nicely smelling smoke
- 11/17/24
- The smoker was still producing smoke when I checked on it at 6 AM so I let it peter out on it's own which took until 8 AM
- The max temperature achieved was 79 F (it was at that point when I opened the lid at 6 AM). The meat had no signs of being cooked (no drippings).
- I brought the bacon in the house and cut off 2 sample strips from each. It is a a bit difficult to cut with the tough skin so you need a sharp knife
- I fried it in a pan. It tastes very smoky and the lower salt content is very apparent. I am quite happy with this first tasting.
- Between the smoke, salt, and bold meat flavor, I can't say there was a meaningful difference between the two version of bacon. The spice flavors don't really come through much at all here actually. I think I would skip the spices in the next version
- 11/29/24 - Baked up some bacon on a sheet pan and collected some nice pictures of it. This was fairly thick cut and turned out very nice and crispy - it is very good tasting bacon. I' really happy with this project
