Bacon

[Black Hand]

For those of you that have made bacon at home, what recipe(s) did you use?

I'd be curious to find a recipe to make double-smoked bacon that doesn't require refrigeration. Preferably one that doesn't result in rock-hard mummified bacon that tastes like a salt lick...

 

[tenngun]

I have not made any sine 2010 or 11, and have no place to make it now, this was what I used to do. In a flat glass baking dish I would cover the bottom with kosher salt. Lay the meat flesh side down and then cover the top and sides with salt making sure it looked like sugared fruit. Let stand in a cool area over night. Discard that now wet salt and repeat turnin the meat over. Do this for three or four days until it stops oozing fluid. Then pepper the whole thing before smoking. I liked to let it rest with the pepper overnight.Then put it in the smoker with cool smoke overnight, s good 18-24 hours. Wrap in a all cotton cloth bag and hang in cool area for a month or so.
It comes out hard and too salty to fry and eat. For pan fried bacon you need to freshen for an hour or two in fresh water changing the water every twenty or thirty minutes.
Mostly I would cook it with dried peas or beans, or boil for an hour or so, remove and cut up and add to a boiled ground corn like mush or that nasty 'g' word.
Several times boiled and cooked it, added chopped onions and mushrooms browned then put in a pudding wrap and boiled to make a meat pudding. Hope that helps.

 

[Black Hand]

Excellent!

 

[zimmerstutzen]

I have made buck board a few times. Brown sugar and tender quick rubbed in. A week in the brine that forms and then rinse and hang in smokehouse

 

[Black Hand]

I'd never heard of buckboard bacon - very interesting. Tough to find pork belly around here, but I can find shoulder.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

ooops double post...

LD

 

[Loyalist Dave]

The chef down the street makes his a couple of ways....he uses part of a pork shoulder too.

He rubs with either pink curing salt, OR "#1 curing salt", and places the meat on a rack in a "college size" fridge set at around 38 degrees. After 24 hours he rubs in the salt a second time, and repeats the process, only he puts the piece of bacon in upside down compared to the previous day. Then he rinses off the water and dies the meat, after the second 24 hour period. It's now ready for smoking.

OR you can leave the bacon on the rack in the fridge, turning every day or two, for about two weeks to dry out the meat. He has "cheated" in the past (he says) by adding some Liquid Smoke to the second day's rub. Otherwise the drying in the fridge will work fine, but you don't get smoke flavor.

He smokes "cold". Which is basically a dehydration of the bacon with smoke added. He tells me originally, a lot of folks dried bacon and hams in the very top of barns if they didn't have smoke houses, and the fire built on the floor of the barn was kept smouldering with smoky wood to keep the flies away from the meat while it dried, BUT the heat in the top of the barn did the trick, and the smoke flavor was just an extra benefit.

So he came up with a contraption, which is basically a barrel (though a large cardboard box would work if lined with foil), and he put in racks, and placed it on his deck..., then he connected this to a Weber table-top grill which was connected to the barrel via a foil, laundry dryer hose. The grill sits on the ground about 12' below the deck....and the hose attaches at the base of the barrel. The lid of the barrel has a hole with a screen....and he lights a small fire with hickoy chips added and the distance to the barrel allows the smoke to cool down and he keeps the temp at about 100 degrees or so. This is "cold" smoking because the heat is not high enough to actually "cook" the meat, but it will dry the meat.

Kind of elaborate, and I'm going to try the fridge idea with the liquid smoke, and Morton's Sugar cure, myself.

LD

 

[Katahdin]

I get smoked bacon from R M Felts in Ivor, VA, pepper cured,smoked,smell it for days and doesn't need refrigeration.comes slab or sliced.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

This Place?

I shall have to try them too!

THANKS :thumbsup:

LD

 

[Katahdin]

That is them,,When you get over to DelMarVa you can find it in the stores.You don't even have to ask,,when you walk in if you can not smell smoked meat,,they don't have it,Your close enough to order or just go over. I buy $100.00 worth every trip up DelMarVa.
You might even find it right there in the Republic,I found it in Norfolk Va,several times.

 

[tenngun]

Just as an aside, English bacon tends to be off the side and not the belly, it's more meaty then our bacon. A local meat market offers English style bacon in Carthage mo. Ironically he packages it as ' hillbilly' bacon.
I would suspect bacon carried by frontiersman military and such back in the day would be more meaty sides and shoulder.
As bellies may be hard fo you to get you could get a rack of ribs and pele the meat off the sides.

 

[Katahdin]

That is how R M FELTS bacon slab is, Lots more meat than Fat Back,

 

[omarick1948]

You can do a Google search and buy "Pork Belly" on line and delivered. Pretty pricey though!

If you have any Asian Markets in your area, they usually have Pork Belly. That's where I get most of mine.

Rick

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Well I can get fresh pork bellies up the street, but it's by the box, and rather pricey and I'd have to be ready to cure a smoke a lot of bacon when it gets delivered.

LD

 

[omarick1948]

You can freeze the bellies that you don't want to cure and smoke right away and only cure and smoke just one at a time.

Rick

 

[Loyalist Dave]

I thought about that but the chef I know closed his eyes and shuddered at the thought of freezing the pork and then thawing, and trying to dry cure and cold smoke the meat when I suggested that. :nono: I don't know if he's so "foody" that the average person wouldn't notice the change in the meat and fat from freezing.

LD