Shame on me.
Micah and I have been enjoying his home-cured bacon for a few weeks now, and I haven’t even updated you on the progress.
My most humble apologies!
Quick recap:
Micah cured a pork belly to make homemade bacon. When it was curing, it looked like this:
pork belly curing in salt, sugar, and lots of garden-grown rosemary
For this step, Micah for the most part referenced a very detailed article from Oregon Live. Other sources for the curing part of the process include this recipe from Saveur and Michael Ruhlman’s recipe (because Ruhlman, author of a book called Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, is pretty much The Man when it comes to curing meats).
No pink salt (Insta Cure No. 1/sodium nitrite) was used in our curing process because a) it was listed as “optional”; b) we didn’t have any; and c) added nitrates/nitrites are chemicals we try to mostly avoid.
Micah also left out the juniper berries because, well, where on earth do you buy juniper berries, anyway? So extra bay leaves and rosemary took the place of those.
Our slab of pork belly cured in the salt/sugar/seasoning mixture for about a week, during which time it was flipped and rotated occasionally and released a fair amount of moisture. Then, Micah cleaned off the cure and it was time for smoking.
Micah wanted to cold-smoke the bacon rather than hot-smoking it (which would have cooked it instead of leaving it raw). Of course, we don’t own any kind of fancy smoking appliances, so (as usual) we improvised:
Micah’s DIY cold smoker, constructed from everyday household items
Micah got the idea for this from the LA Weekly blog and (again, for the most part) followed their instructions, subbing an aluminum beer can for the tin can that they suggested.
To make your own cold smoker, you need….
- a soldering iron (preferably one that’s never been soldered with before–we picked up a cheapie from the hardware store for about $15)
- a large roasting pan
- a wire rack
- a tin or aluminum can, with the top almost completely removed so it makes kind of a flip-top lid
- wood chips
- ice packs
- foil
You can see in the picture basically how all this is put together. The wood chips are inside the PBR can, and the soldering iron rests inside of that where it heats the wood to create smoke, but no fire–pretty cool! Once you’ve got your roasting pan smoker set up, you just put whatever food item you would like to smoke onto the rack, turn on the soldering iron, and cover the whole rig with aluminum foil to keep the smoke in.
The day Micah smoked his bacon, he had the smoker going pretty much all day, changing the woodchips out about every hour or two. Our whole house and porch and yard were enveloped in an intoxicating aura of porky smoke, which was fabulous. Even our hair and our clothes smelled like bacon. And I have to admit, while I always find Micah attractive, somehow he’s extra sexy when he’s bacon-scented. 
When the bacon was done smoking late that evening, it looked like this:
just look at that smoky golden glow….
And it smelled incredible.
Since the whole slab was about three pounds, Micah cut it into six 8-ounce hunks, and we froze all but one of them.
Then, finally, it was time to try the bacon!
Micah sliced it nice and thick. This is what it looked like raw:
nice ‘n’ streaky
And then we cooked it up good and crispy in a cast-iron skillet:
<insert drool here>
The verdict?
Amazing.
This bacon tastes like bacon squared, perfectly smoky and porky and delicious. The only change Micah said he will make next time (oh, yes, there will be a next time!) is to cure the bacon for a slightly shorter amount of time, maybe 4-5 days instead of a week, as this batch is almost, but not quite, on the verge of being too salty.
I think we’ve devoured half of this batch of bacon in just a few short weeks, enjoying it on burgers and sandwiches, with eggs and toast for breakfast, and crumbled over a bed of tangy, spicy collard greens:
served with black-eyed peas, summer squash, and cornbread, naturally
Not only has this project sold us on curing our own bacon from now on, but it has also inspired us to branch out into other curing and smoking experiments–I am itching to try making our own smoked salmon!
In the meantime, we’ve still got a pound and a half of beautiful home-cured, home-smoked pork belly in our freezer, and I can’t imagine it will last much longer.
After all, everything’s better with bacon.
