Bacon makin’
Seeing as it seems to be the only pork I can eat any more, I decided to learn how to make my own bacon. I’ve been buying it at Costco for a while now and while the price is right, the thin, gelatinous, mucusy slices fry up pretty uninspiring. Maybe I could do better myself.
Armed with zero knowledge beyond this well-written guide and the knowledge that plenty of others have managed to do it before me, I went right to the Amish market.
3/4 cup kosher salt, 1/3 cup homemade brown sugar, 1/8 cup fresh ground pepper, and 1 cup grade B maple syrup got rubbed into 6 pounds of Pennsylvania-raised pork belly.
It got tucked into a plastic bag and it’ll get flipped every day for the next week.
I pruned our little fruit trees today and saved the twigs. They’ll go into the smoker, supplemented with twigs from our sugar maple.
Mmmmm bacon!
February 19th, 2011 at 11:13 am
Not sure how much you clipped but you may need more. It takes a whole bag of wood chips to smoke for the amount of time your thinking about.
February 19th, 2011 at 4:36 pm
I didn’t clip that much – a round handful of long twigs. It’ll have to just supplement other wood, unfortunately. Where do you get your wood chips? And how big a bag are you talking about?
Oh! And I discovered that it only goes for a day and a half if you can keep it under 100F; if your smoker is hotter (around 200F) then you only smoke for 4 hours. That makes it easier!
February 19th, 2011 at 11:29 am
VERY EXCITING!
February 19th, 2011 at 6:00 pm
I’ll ask Phil what the temp usually runs, we usually use mesquite (you could use hickory, apple or cherry but we like mesquite). Usually from Lowes.
February 20th, 2011 at 7:28 pm
great work baby!