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Bacon 2017

wow! that is nice looking bacon. well done, sir. which of those bacon cures do you like the best? I've got two slabs of Kutas' honey cured bacon coming out of the cure today. smoke them tomorrow.
 
I haven't eaten enough of the maple to compare but the honey turned out great.

I prefer some pepper flavor but my family does not.

 
Very nice Doug! We just got the bacon back from our hog. My wife's family is the one who raises the hogs and hosts the butchering, then does the specialty cuts. Their bacon is awesome and it's always nice knowing where it came from!
 
Kutas' honey cured bacon is damn good bacon. Since this is my first time making bacon at home, I followed the recipe and cooking temps straight from the book. the belly I got at Costco was a pretty meaty one. I got the amount of smoke right, but this is a bit salty when pan fried for my taste. I did a little experiment. I usually always bake bacon in the oven, so I cut a couple dozen rashers and baked half of it as is, a few pieces soaked in water for 15 minutes, patted dry, and few pieces soaked in water for 30 minutes and rinsed well and patted dry. after baking all of it together to my satisfaction I tasted to see how I affected the saltiness. results were as expected. baking it straight up was a little less salty than pan fried, soaked for 15 min is about what I would want on my plate and soaked 30 min and rinsed well was barely still bacon. next batch I'm just gonna rinse and pat dry.

I'll be fetching another belly or two asap. I'm going to reduce the salt in the dry rub/cure and add about 1T black pepper per two lbs of belly. do half with honey and half with brown sugar to see if I can tell any difference. for as long as I've been smoking meats, I cannot figure out why it took me so long to attempt bacon. store bought bacon might be a thing of the past around here from now on.
 
Last year i forgot to rinse the cure off and it was REALLY salty.

This year per the instructions i rinsed the cure off well and them let it air dry and them smoked and its perfect.

 
my bacon odyssey moving along again. I've done considerable research and found very little beyond what I already know, but I do believe that the honey-cured bacon recipe in Kutas' book contains a glaring misprint. it calls for 4 tablespoons of Insta-cure #1, one cup of salt, and two cups of honey, then goes on to say "The above formula will cure about one slab of bacon." now, "one slab of bacon" in my mind is one pork belly. all of the ones I've picked over to get what I want weighed between 8 and 12 lbs. 4 tablespoons of Instacure #1 is enough cure for about 60lbs of meat according to all of my experience with using it. I don't know why I didn't catch that before my first bacon was finished and half eaten. I usually always weigh the cure anyways, but I followed the recipe this time and thought nothing of it, like an idiot, using 4 T when I only needed 2 teaspoons. lesson learned. I did find some interesting ideas while researching and concocted three dry cure recipes that sounded good to me based on all of the recipes I found online and elsewhere. since I'm still in experimental mode with making bacon, I got the biggest belly I could find and cut it into 3 pieces, one for each of the cures I'm trying. all of these cures contain both honey and brown sugar and at least 1/4 cup of kosher salt and the appropriate amount of cure for the weight of the belly section it's going on. One has only black pepper, one has smoked paprika, cumin, and red pepper flakes, the other has black pepper, ground juniper berries, sage and thyme. they are in the smoker now, but I did a taste test last night to check salinity and see how they tasted. all were much better on saltiness and all were very tasty, but quite different. I read about using cocoa powder, ground coffee, various fresh herbs in dry cures. seems the possibilities are endless. once I find the right flavors, I'll be on the hunt for some quality bellies from Berkshire or Duroc hogs, hopefully localish. good bye industrial bacon.

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I like to use the exact weight of the meat to calculate the amount of cure. I have a spreadsheet that I made where I can put in the desired parts per million of nitrite and lets me specify the percentage of total salt. I usually do 156 ppm @ 2.8%. That's pretty salty but I like it like that.
 
I also use the exact weight of the meat to calculate the amount of cure and use .20 ounces(that is two tenths of an ounce) of cure per pound of belly.

as it were, the spicy honey cure concoction was our favorite. the subtle hint of cumin and red pepper flakes are wonderful in bacon. I tweaked the dry cure mixture a little this time and converted the measurements from volume to weight so I can easily adjust incrementally in the future if necessary. I upped the black pepper, slightly reduced paprika, garlic, cumin and red pepper flakes stayed the same, and this time I added about a half cup of fresh chopped rosemary to the cure as well as a fresh Bay leaf to each half belly. I also slightly reduced the salt, upped the amount of brown sugar, and used only enough honey to make the dry cure stick long enough to get them into the vac bag. I cannot prove it yet, but I suspect that vacuum sealing these necessarily reduces the curing time. I did these for 96 hours, same as last time, and it seemed perfect despite everything I've read saying 5 to 7 to as much as ten days of curing. I rigged up a way to dry them really well over night to, hopefully, get a good firm pellicle. smoke them tomorrow. that little battery operated fan moves a considerable amount of air on the low setting. Bacon rules.

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