The Bacon Escapade

I have many people to thank for my love of pork, a large portion of these thanks go out to Anthony Bourdain. From his trips to pork sausage heaven and into the world of whole roast hog, it doesn't get much better than that. My love for pork has inevitably brought me to bacon. I love to eat it, and recently I have come to enjoy curing and smoking it too!

This is not my first experience with curing bacon, though you could not tell by the way things turned out. I have been making my own bacon for about 6 months now and I love it. The flavor is so much better, you can alter it to suit your tastes. There are so many variables you can adjust, from the salt cure to the spices, sweet or savory. You can even use a variety of different woods for amazing smoky flavors!

I have gotten pretty good at the curing process and it is fairly simple. I work in a small, fairly clean kitchen so I feel confident in using no nitrites for my bacon, just salt and spices! I like to cure my bacon for 5 days, it gives a good salt level and I can even rinse with liquid if it is to salty. I often change my cure blend however lately it has contained kosher salt, black pepper, mustard and garlic powder. I also add brown sugar as it carmelizes well and counters the saltiness to help balance the cure.

My cures get better and better each time and I was really excited about this batch! How does the cure work you ask? Well the salt actually pulls moisture out of the meat acting as a natural preservative by curing the meat. The belly will become more and more firm as moisture is removed. This is the belly after it was cured, I rinse the salt and spices off with apple juice as I think it adds a little flavor to the meat!

This is the point where the smoking begins. You need to dry the belly out first so a "pellicle" can form. This can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour but it is the only way the smoke will stick to the meat(sounds weird, doesn't it?), the meat will even be sticky to the touch when ready for the smoker. Normally, in the summer I use a small charcoal barbeque grill for my smoking. I use a mixture of about 80% apple wood and 20% cherry wood. This does not work so well in the winter though, because it is hard to control the coals in -20C. I have made bacon twice since winter has reared it's ugly head and have failed both times due to one reason, a gas grill!

I am not here to knock the use of gas grills to smoke, however I would advise against it especially if you are using a single burner. If you can control your grill in sections, you will not have this problem. However I can't so below is my lesson.

You can imagine my horror finding my lovely pork belly on fire. I took it off right after turning off the grill, it was still smoldering. As you can see from the pictures, the light is not that bad, the bacon is that burnt! I was able to trim off the charred meat, however as you can see below that accounted for about 95% of the meat. After I trimmed off all the char, I smoked it again( on the charcoal grill of course!) and this is what I got. This is how my bacon should have looked, but much larger.

So what have we learned? I need to invest in a small smoker! What else did we learn? Do not try and use a single burner gas grill for smoking bacon! Your bacon will pay the price and it is heart wrenching. All in all the little bacon I have left is spectacular. Slightly smoky and peppery, this bacon will go great with anything!  I am going to make one amazing carbonara with what I have left. I may even post that on here too, oh and my next bacon experiment...maybe maple bacon?