I’ve decided to dabble in some bacon curing. Doesn’t seem too difficult

Do to my location I’ve decided to work with a wet cure to start, go into Dry cure this winter

Suggestions? Favorite brines? Dry Cures?

I do have “Pink Salt’

Bssed on experience, what do I need to avoid?

What’s easiest way to remove the skin? I don’t mind having a hard rind, I got quite accustomed to it while living in the UK. I guess I can try it both ways

Jeff Yarchin to the courtesy phone please. Best bacon I have ever experienced.

quote:

Originally posted by Powers77:
Jeff Yarchin to the courtesy phone please. Best bacon I have ever experienced.

Thanks!

I only have experience with dry curing, can't help with this one.

So, I wet cure bacon. But of course, I'm on the tail end of 30 lb (2 full bellies) I made a few years ago, and I can't lay my hands on my recipe.

Let me look some more and see if I can find it.

I've mostly done it this way, and I like my approach because you worry less about needing to soak the belly at the end to reduce the salt (which I had to do when I tried dry curing). I cure for 72 hours more or less to the minute and get consistent results.

The one disadvantage is that you have much less ability to spice/flavor the bacon and have it come through unless you go crazy in the brine with the spices or flavors (thinking honey, sorghum, etc).

I put half the water volume in a pot with the sugar/salt/pink salt/honey/spices and heat close to boiling to dissolve the ingredients. Then I weigh out the rest of the water I need as ice and add it to the hot liquid to get to a usable temperature quickly. Usually do this in a great big Ziploc (2.5 gal or bigger)and add the bellies, force the air out and cinch the bag, generally with the whole thing in a bus tub or fridge drawer to contain leaks in the fridge.

After the cure time, I rinse off, put it on a rack in the fridge to dry off and form a pellicle. Then into the cold smoker at ~130F until the bacon is close to that temperature.

There's also the idea of an "equilibrium cure" that applies to both brines and dry cures, I think. More weights and math up front, but less susceptible to over-curing. I have meant to try this but haven't cured anything lately.

Either way, I recommend a good kitchen scale and a gram scale (my "crack scale") from Amazon.

I use Tenderquick, maple sugar and pepper. As soon as the weather cools I'll order a couple slabs of belly and get some going.

I see you are in NO. For dry curing we wait until the evening temps get into the 40's.

I use an old school method used in the western NC mountains for generations. The rub is 1/3 brown sugar, 1/3 kosher salt and 1/3 black pepper.

We butcher the hogs and leave the skin on the bellies (and jowls). You mix the rub completely and cover the meat with a thick covering, top and sides.

This does make a mess as they shed liquid. I use a 2x4 foot piece of plywood that sits on a plastic folding table that I only use for this. I can fit 2 bellies on the plywood. I put a waterproof, disposable drop cloth under the table and cover the cloth with clay based kitty litter to soak up the liquid. It makes it easy to clean up and I know a guy to get a deal on the litter.

I'll put a good bit of just salt on the table and put the bellies skin side down on the salt.

My barn isn't completely air tight, you need some air circulating. During the six weeks I'll check once in a while to be sure there is no meat showing and add more cure if needed.

After 6 weeks it's done. I use a pressure washer (on low) to get all of the rub off. I'll slice the bellies in quarters, skin them, slice and vacuum pack it in portions.

I also slice the skin in strips and dehydrate them to use as dog treats. My dogs love them. The skin doesn't absorb much salt to it's okay.

If we get a warm spell during the cure (above 50 at night) the bellies will absorb lots of salt if it stays warm for a while. To address this, when I fry the bacon I'll use a cast iron pan and will cover the bacon with about an inch of water. Once the water boils I'll pour it out and cook normally. This gets rid of the excess salt.

Hope this helps! Looking forward to seeing your results.

HERE'S A WRITE-UP I DID FOR ANOTHER FELLA, JUST COPIED/PASTED HERE. Feel free to ignore the part about doing it buckboard style with shoulder, process is the same with belly:

For your first bacon, I'd recommend starting with buckboard bacon (just pork butt). It's a cheap way to break the ice and build confidence! The taste is identical, and you end up with a 3:1 meat to fat ratio instead of the inverse with belly. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE fatty belly bacon, but I find a lot of pleasure in the thrift of curing and sausage making, and buckboard yields much better at roughly 1/3 of the cost! Occasionally, you'll read a comment that buckboard tastes more hammy than bacony, but those folks 1) didn't smoke long enough, and usually tried smoking it as one big hunk; or 2) Warm smoked instead of cold smoking it which provides a much more robust smokey bacon flavor. Cold smoking is THE way to go for bacon in my not so humble opinion! Your smoking method and the following meat cutting step will take care of that.

Instead of curing a whole thick gnarly butt, I butterfly them open and cut in half while removing the bone. Here's how:
http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/a/b...uckboard-bacon (except go ahead and separate the two halves completely). This way you end up with 2 slabs that are roughly the thickness of regular belly bacon for more even curing and better smoke penetration. An average 10# butt will yield 2 pieces at appx 4.4# after bone loss and slight "squaring" cuts. Make sure to remove the gray stinky gland meat from the edge of the butt, most meat packers don't. Stinky butt gland, HA!!!

I HIGHLY recommend an equilibrium dry cure. It leaves nothing to chance (i.e. ALL too common oversalting woes) the way a wet cure does, plus saves a lot of frig space. It's impossible to oversalt or under cure this way, plus in my opinion it just tastes better than a wet cured bacon. You'll need a digital meat scale (preferably that goes over 5#) and a digital jewelers scale that will read in increments of a gram for measuring the cure in the necessarily exacting amounts. You can get both on amazon for about $12-$15 each. The jewelers scale I got goes down to 0.01 grams which is more ideal with the small amounts of cure #1 than a .1g increment scale. Speaking of cure, make sure to keep it out of reach of kids and pets. It looks inviting like kool-aid/sugar mix in a bag (we called it "cocaine" and took it everywhere in our pockets as kids for our sugar fix lol, ghetto I know, it's where I grew up), but the cure is toxic when ingested in significant amounts straight from the bag.

Next, simply convert your meat weight to grams (1# = ~455g), then weigh out your salt (+/- 2.5% of your meat weight = meat grams x 0.025), your brown sugar (+/- 1% of your meat weight = meat grams x 0.01), and your cure (EXACTLY 1/4th of 1% of your meat weight = meat grams x 0.0025).

Example with your theoretical 4.4# slabs:
4.4# x 455g = 2002 grams meat weight (let's round to 2000g for easy math.

2000g x .025 = 50 grams salt (any brand plain kosher or plain non-iodized).
2000g x .01 = 20 grams brown sugar.
2000g x .0025 = 5 grams pink cure #1.

You'll weigh each of the two slabs and calculate/mix/cure separately, so it's an opportunity to play with adjusting your salt and sugar levels to find your preferred taste. Try and stay between 2%-3% salt, and .75%-1.25% brown sugar. Don't mess with the cure level, it will give you exactly 156ppm nitrite per USDA FSIS guidelines. You can also play around with adding other spices in each batch, but honestly I find that not much of the additional flavors actually penetrate the meat at the curing stage. If I want pepper bacon, I'll usually lightly oil or maple syrup paint the slabs right towards the END of the smoke (an hour or so remaining) and pepper crust it then. Some folks will oil or syrup coat it and stick spices on before smoking, BUT in my opinion, this greatly inhibits smoke absorption into the actual meat. In my experience, when this is done the smoke all sticks to the oil/syrup/spices barrier on the outside, making the exterior bitter and the interior boring.

Anywhoo, mix the 3 dry cure ingredients thoroughly in a bowl and apply it evenly to all sides of your meat inside of a 2.5 gallon ziploc (available at Walmart). Be sure all of the cure gets on the meat and into the bag. If your meat has been previously frozen or for whatever other reason doesn't look like it's wet enough to release enough liquid to dissolve all of the dry ingredients during the curing stage, you can add a LITTLE water to help get things moving along. Just make sure you add the water weight into the meat weight in grams for the purpose of calculating your cure ingredients. 1/4 cup should be more than enough, so just add 59 grams (1c H20 = 236g, 1/4c = 59g) to your meat weight when calculating. Squeeze the air out of the bag, seal it up, massage everything to spread it around equally, and place in frig for 5 days minimum, up to 10 days if your schedule is tight. I usually cure Friday night and remove from the cure the following Friday to prepare for a Saturday smoke. You'd go shorter or longer for thinner or super thick pieces, but 5-10 days is perfect for a 2"-3" thick piece of meat. An equilibrium cure can't over/under cure in this time period as it's exactly the correct amount of salt/sugar/cure that your meat can absorb based on meat weight and absorbency potential. Make SURE to gently massage the package and flip it over once a day to redistribute the fluids and cure for even curing. When it's cured, remove from the bag (the night before you'll smoke it), give a quick cold water rinse, thoroughly pat dry, and put it unwrapped on a wire rack in your frig overnight to dry the surface and form the shiny/tacky pellicle layer. This will help it absorb smoke evenly.


The next day, prep your smoker to run at very low temp (100-125 max at grate/meat level, if you can) with plenty of smoke wood chunks to provide clean, even, consistent smoke throughout a long "warm smoke". Make sure to keep your meat away from direct rising heat, so as to not cook it, you'll cook it later after you slice and pan-fry it. I've heard of some people taking their bacon to 150IT at the end of the smoke to make it edible without further cooking, but I've never tried that, it just doesn't appeal to me! I have a homemade version of a Cajun Bandit 22" kettle insert, but taller with 2 racks, that works perfect for bacon. I use an A-Maze-N Products AMNPS pellet maze resting on my sweeper fins all the way at the bottom of my kettle to generate the smoke, and a single row briquette snake method on the perimeter of the charcoal grate to generate JUST enough heat to achieve a low temp warm smoke and create a good draft. Then i hang my meat slabs from the top rack with a deflector on the bottom rack to shield the meat from rising and radiant heat. Plenty of folks successfully warm smoke bacon with just wood chunks over charcoal though, so whatever you do will work as long as you're providing consistent clean "thin blue" smoke and minimal heat to create draft. Good airflow is critical when cold/warm smoking, as a cooler smoker doesn't draft as well and can let the smoke stagnate and make your food bitter like an ashtray if you're not careful. The balancing act is having a little heat to create draft, but not so much that your food cooks before it takes on an ideal amount of smoke. Make sure to keep your smoker in the shade to help keep temps down this time of year. For bacon at cool/warm smoke temps, 8-12 hours is ideal. You'll also start to get a feel for how much smoke flavor the bacon will end up with based on the nice rich color on the meat during the middle/end of the smoking session. The nitrite in the cure will keep your meat safe for extended periods in this otherwise "danger zone". Another tip; I buy cheap bamboo skewers to put on my cooking grate to put meat on when cold smoking food that I can't hang. Just in case there's some bacteria lurking on my cooking grate and I won't be making it hot enough to kill the bacteria. Here's some good reading on cold vs hot smoking.
http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/t/1...-and-hot-smoke

When you're all done, let the meat rest at room temp to cool, then pat dry and seal it up tight in 2.5 gallon ziplocs (or vacuum sealer bags work great if you have a foodsaver) for 1-3 days in the frig to let the smoke and moisture equalize throughout the whole slabs. Then, just before slicing, pop the bags/slabs in your freezer for 30-60 minutes to firm up nice to make slicing easier. A meat slicer is ideal, but a sharp, long knife and a steady hand will do. Make sure to slice against/across the grain of the meat or it'll be chewy. Also, since shoulder is a much more worked part of the animal, buckboard bacon tends to have a LITTLE more toothiness to it. Not much, but enough that you don't want to slice it like a thick cut belly bacon, or the thick slices will be more of a chew than most people associate with bacon. Thin slicing will alleviate/eliminate that issue.

If you vacseal your portions, they'll keep good for +/- 6 months in the freezer. Otherwise, I'm thinking maybe a month or two in tight freezer wrap, but am not sure as I vacseal.

You'll notice some sections will be much fattier than others. The fatty sections will fry like normal bacon, the leaner sections will need 2-4 Tbsp of a light oil in the skillet to help get the frying action started.

See, my semi competent response prompted a real competent response. My understanding is that you can also equilibrium cure with a brine. You just have to include the water weight in the total weight that you're basing your cure weight percentage upon.

I have successfully used the recipes for Simple Bacon and Maple Bacon from this website.
BACON!
The maple bacon was so good, my wife agreed that I should get a meat slicer to keep doing it. There's a calculator on the website to determine the proper amount of Prague Powder (pink salt - just make sure you are using the right kind) to get a safe nitrite concentration. Takes about a week in the cure, then smoked to 155 degrees. Its sooooo much better than store bought!