The Last of the Bacon... For Now.

So the other two slabs of pork belly came out of the cure this past weekend.  These were brined using Pop's Brine from The Smoking Meat Forums website.  It's well regarded and from what he says, being a less salty cure, you can go past your target date a bit without going into "Too Salty" territory.

Happiness is a crisp morning with a smokin' Egg.

 Essentially, the recipe is pretty darn easy.  1 Gallon of cold water (obviously, the better the water you've got, the better off you are - I used tap water with the chlorine and fluoride filtered out), 1 cup non-iodized table salt, 1 cup regular sugar, 1 cup brown sugar, and 1 ounce curing salt (Cure 1, pink salt, prague powder 1 - there many different labels this stuff has - but we're NOT talking about Morton's Tenderquick or Cure #2 here).

26 hours of Apple smoke can put some color on your bacon!

Mix it all together (no reason to heat the water - it'll all dissolve just fine with some heavy stirring.  Pop says that for full bellies, you should go for between 10-14 days in the brine.  Since my bellies were a little on the thick side - just a hair over 2 inches at the thickest part - I went the full 14 days.

I pulled them from the brine and let them dry on a rack in the fridge for a day or so to get that tacky pellicle to form.  Then I smoked them over Apple wood for about 26 hours straight (I let it go all night) and then back in the fridge to get cold before slicing.

Pretty...

My meat slicer (the Edgecraft 610) gets a workout on this process.  I can say now that I understand why some say to just save your money and buy a used Hobart slicer off craigslist.  This slicer tends to pull the meat downward which seems to leave a chunk along the bottom that I find myself having to trim off.

But, the good news is that there is plenty of trim bagged up to use to flavor soups, stews, greens, and who knows what else.

I gotta admit, it sure is a neat thing to see piles of sliced bacon all over the counter waiting to get the vacuum pack treatment from the Food Saver.

Not from this batch.  But still pretty!

Okay - full confession mode here.  I can't believe this but I actually forgot to save a couple slices to fry up.  My wife and I were not feeling 100% due to a head cold that has been making its rounds and we were anxious to get the job done.

So, the picture you see to the left is the previous week's bacon... the stuff I said was a little on the salty side.  As soon as I've finished off cooking what is left of that bag, I'll thaw out a package of this week's bacon to see how different it is.

In the future, I'll need to remember to slice off a chunk when it comes out of the cure BEFORE hitting the smoker.  That way, if its too salty, I can soak it in cold water before smoking it to help draw out some of the salt.  I failed to do that on BOTH of these batches.  I'm such a rookie!

Bacon is the Word. Help Spread the Word!

Benjamin Franklin once said that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.  I'm inclined to agree with him on that count but I propose that he also meant to include bacon in that statement but ran out of ink for his quill.  Furthermore, being a Christian, I often rejoice at Christ's gift of deliverance from Kosher law.  Without which, I'd be stuck with corned beef (which is no bad thing in and of itself, of course).

Salt cured pork belly, otherwise known as bacon, has experienced quite the increase in popularity of late.  And its easy to understand why.  It's mind boggling just how good it is; with chocolate, with pancakes and syrup or just by itself.  Salty goodness with pork fat!

I tried to make bacon a couple years ago.  I was brand new to meat curing (well, I guess technically I still am, but I've made corned beef a couple times and even a pastrami) at the time and it looked so easy from Michael Ruhlman's book, "Charcuterie".  You just rub a big pork belly down with a mixture of salt, sugar, and curing salt, stick it in a ziplock, wait a week, and you're done.  After that you can cold smoke it, hot smoke it, or fry it up as is.  What could be easier.


I tried it.  And the results were... salty.  Like WAY too salty.  Not to mention that I'd intended to hot smoke it in the Big Green Egg until it reached about 150 degrees.  But it rained the night I was planning to do it so it went into the oven to cook.  But I left it in too long and it got to about 175 degrees...  to make a sad story short, I chunked it as inedible.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago and my first adventure in pig butchery.  I now had about 12lbs of pork belly to figure out what to do with.  As I mentioned in this post about my post butchery plans, I was going to do bacon in two different methods.

This time, per the advice of another bacon maker, I used Ruhlman's basic cure mixture at a ratio of 4% by weight to the belly.  I can't remember what this section of belly weighed but lets say it was about 4lbs or 1800grams.  4% of that weight would be 1800 grams x .04 = 72 grams.  So using that method would call for 72 grams of the basic dry cure to be rubbed.  So... that's what I did.

Then I put it in a ziplock bag and put it in the fridge to sit for 7 days.  Over that time, I flipped it everyday.  From other descriptions of the process, I expected the cure to draw out a great deal of moisture which would form something of a brine in the bag.  However, I didn't experience that at all - as a result, flipping the bag every so often was kind of pointless (as the idea is to make sure that all sides of the meat spend quality time in the brine).  However, I could tell the meat was curing as it was getting quite a bit firmer.  By about day 3 or 4, it was pretty rigid.

Rinsed and dry

 After a week, I removed it from the bag and rinsed under cold water and then patted it dry with a towel.  Then I let it sit over night uncovered in the fridge to form a pellicle.

A pellicle is a tacky film of sorts that will form on the surface of meat as it dries.  Its very helpful in making sure the smoke adheres to the meat.  If you smoke wet meat, you wind up with something that sort of looks like splotchy ashes.

So, into the fridge it went.  The next morning, I pulled it out and it felt tacky as I'd hoped.  Unfortunately, I learned a little something about my fridge.  I'd put the belly on the top most shelf (as the whole bottom of the fridge was filled up with brine buckets), right below where the cold air comes in from the freezer.  So there were a few parts that got overly dry and I wound up trimming those off.

After 12 hours of cold smoke

After resting in the fridge after a day of smoke

Sliced bacon is a lovely thing

Trying out the new slicer.

Then I started up the smoker (my Big Green Egg combined with an A-Maze-N Pellet smoker tray) and in the bacon went for about 12 hours.








After coming out of the smoker (which had a blend of hickory, apple and maple pellets), I let it rest in the fridge (not the top shelf this time) overnight.


I fried up a slice in a skillet to see how it came out.  While a little saltier than I'd prefer, it had great flavor - strong pork flavor with a touch of sweet/salt.  My wife (who is less sensitive to salt) loved it.






I got to give the new meat slicer a workout.  While it wasn't perfect, it certainly sliced in better than I could have with a knife.

Certainly the thinner the slice, the less salt you get in every bite.  Slicing it by hand would have yielded slices that were too salty for me to enjoy so having the meat slicer kind of saved me,





I vacuumed up 1lb portions in the Foodsaver and then put all the trim/end pieces in another pack to use in beans or soups and such.  Too nice and smoky a flavor to toss out.

All in all, I'd call this a great success.  The cold smoking process is easy with my rig and I think it really adds a great flavor.  I meant to take a picture of the final product fried up but I was too busy eating it!

As a side note, since this bacon is cold smoked, its not safe to eat until fully cooked.  So when handling it, treat it as if it were raw (in terms of cleaning up and washing hands etc...).

I still have two more slabs in a brine that I'll give the same treatment to later on this week.  This time I plan to smoke a little longer and with just maple pellets.  Looking forward to it.

The problem will be having the patience to wait until I can try all the different recipes for bacon that are out there.  Maple extract, bourbon, brown sugar, molasses, jalapeno...  Too much bacon, not enough time!

Second Day - Curing/Rendering/Sausage

After a much needed night's sleep, it was time to get down to the business of processing.  I gotta tell you, I was beat.  Once the cutting and such had been completed the night before, there was a great deal of clean up.  My wife had embraced the idea of the me butchering a hog on her counter.  It would have been unproductive to leave bone dust and fat scraps all over the counter and the floor.

But there were lots of bowls containing lots of pork parts in lots of places in several fridges.  I needed to get them "working".  After all, you can't EAT bacon until the bacon is done being made... and nobody else was going to make this bacon, but me!

*I actually didn't do all this on one day - some lard was done on one day and the rest the next.  Sausage was made on one day and then smoked the next - so technically, this entry encompasses two days for those of you who are paying too close attention.*


I started with the leaf fat.  I wasn't going to use any of that for sausage. Apparently it is too hard for sausage and doesn't work well being instead prized for biscuits and pie crusts.  So I diced it up into smallish chunks and tossed it into the crock pot.

Leaf fat in the slow cooker

Covering and setting the cooker on low will, over the coarse of the whole day, turn the fat into lard.  It helps to put 1/4 cup of water into the bottom so that as the initial fat starts to melt it doesn't start to scorch or burn first.  Once everything is starting the cook down and become liquid, cant the lid open a bit to let the moisture evaporate.

Floaty (is that a word?) bits

Here it is after several hours.  For what its worth, I removed the skin before I rendered this out.  What is floating around in there are essentially the "husks" of the above cubed fatty chunks.

Think of them like bacon.  You have the meaty part and the fatty part.  When you fry it up, the fatty part doesn't really disappear leaving you with a couple slivers of meaty parts.  It still holds some sort of structure.  These little bits are essentially the outside structure.

Strained floaty bits

Here are some of said floaty bits on a paper towel.  I'm not quite sure what to do with them.  Are they cracklin'?  I thought they were.  Some say that cracklin' is instead the skin that is left on when rendering lard.  I thought those were pork rinds.

Who the heck knows... I've got to do some research on this.

Hot rendered lard in canning jars.

 After the fat has rendered down, I killed the heat to the crockpot and strained it through a cheese cloth lined strainer and then put it into jars.

Make sure you don't skip the straining step.  Any little chunks and floaty bits that you leave in the liquid fat with cause it to go rancid that much sooner.

Let it cool on the counter and then put it into the freezer or fridge until ready to use.

Both types after cooling (left is back fat lard, right is leaf lard)

I repeated the process with the back fat.  I wound up with 4 pints of leaf lard and 2 pints of back fat lard.

To the right is a side by side comparison.  The whiter jar on the right is the leaf lard.  It should have much less pork flavor than the back fat lard on the right - which is why it is preferred for baking.

We used some leaf lard in some corn bread the other night and I have to say, it was excellent.

Getting some help mixing spices

Now it was time for the sausage.  I planned to do about 10 lbs of cold smoked kielbasa.  I had 5 lbs of grass fed beef round roast and about 4 lbs of pork trimmings and a pound of back fat.  After mixing up the spices.  The meat was ground, mixed, and stuffed into hog casings.

They dried in the fridge over night to develop a pellicle - which is the tacky sticky "film" that develops when meat starts to dry out.  This is what gets the smoke to adhere.  If you casings are still wet when you try to smoke them, you'll get bad results.

Getting smoke... 

I planned to cold smoke the kielbasa.  I understood this to be a way to get much more mellow and deep smoke flavor.  Since there was a curing salt in the sausage I wasn't worried about letting them sit in warm (55 degrees) Big Green Egg for 10 hours or so.

The Big Green Egg is a little tricky to convince to smoke without generating heat.  After all, I wanted to smoke the sausage, not cook it (I'd cook it later once I'd applied lots of smoke to it).  So, I used something called an A-Maze-N-Pellet Smoker.

A-Maze-N Pellet smoker in the bottom of the Big Green Egg

 Its a pretty slick little thing.  You fill it with your choice of wood pellets and light it.  Provided it has enough airflow, it creates a nice stream of steady smoke for more 12 hours (which was more than I needed).  AND, it generates about as much heat as a lit cigarette.

I hope to tinker with using it to smoke salmon and cheese at some point.  But for right now, I'm still in pork mode.

After 10 hours of cold smoke, the sausage went into the fridge to rest.  I see people say that this lets the sausage equalize the flavors and such.  For me, it was more that it was late and I was ready to hit the sack.

The next day it rained and so I just cooked the sausage in the oven to an internal temp of 150 degrees.  Cut it into sections and vacuum sealed it up.




Sadly, I have no pictures of brining the bacon or the ham.  The brine recipe comes from a well regarded source on The Smoking Meat Forum website.  It's called Pop's Brine and seems to yield good results and has a loyal following.

I injected the ham with a good bit of the brine and put it in a 5 gallon food safe bucket and covered it in two gallons of the brine, weighting it down with a big zip-lock filled with water to keep it under the brine.

For the three bacon sections, I put two of them in another bucket with the same brine (1 gallon) and weighted them down the same way.  The other section was rubbed down in a curing mix taken from Ruhlman's book "Charcuterie" that I mentioned in another post.  It is regarded as being overly salty but I had some guidance from a Facebook post (Thanks Mark!) to just use 4% of it based on weight.  So if the meat weighed 2000 grams (2 kilograms) then 4% of that would be 80 grams of basic cure mix to rub the meat down with.  Put it in a tightly sealed zip lock back and stick in the fridge.  It will draw moisture out and almost make a brine so be sure to flip it daily so that all sides get plenty of time in contact with the brine.  After 7 days, you pull it out, rinse it off and let it dry in the fridge (that pellicle thing again!) before you smoke it.

The cure-rubbed bacon after a week.

I realize I am fast forwarding a week here with this picture but here is the piece of bacon after it was rinsed and dried off.

It's sitting the fridge as I type this and will go into the cold smoker tomorrow morning for most of the day.  Hopefully it comes out well.  But if not, there's two more curing in a brine that will be ready in about another week.