Home Cured and Smoked Bacon
Be forewarned, homemade bacon will spoil you for the store bought stuff but it is sooo easy to make! The only special equipment you need are a smoker of some sort, wood or wood chips and a food thermometer and some time (10 days + 15 hours ish) that is almost all hands-off...
- 1 kilogram "happy" pork belly, skin on
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 1/3 cup additive-free salt (like kosher salt or some sea salt, check the label)
- 1/2 teaspoon sodium nitrate (pink salt) (completely optional and we did not use it in the video)
- 10 Days
Mix the sugar and the salt together (and the optional sodium nitrate). Pat the mixture all over the pork belly, make sure you get the mixture on all sides. Put the meat into a Ziploc bag and add any of the sugar/salt mixture that has fallen off into the bag as well. Zip the bag and lay it flat in the fridge. Leave it for 10 days, turning it over every couple of days.
- 1 hourAfter the 10 days have passed, take the pork out of the bag and immerse it in a bowl, pot or bucket of cool water for 30 minutes to remove some of the salt. Once the 30 minutes has passed, repeat by pouring out the soaking water and adding new, cool water to the pot. Soak again for 30 minutes.
- 45-60 minutes
Pat the pork dry with paper towels and let it sit for 45 minutes on a rack to develop the pellicle. It will be a little tacky.
- 12-18 hours
Put the pork on the smoker's rack and place it in the smoker with the lid on. Add wood/wood chips to your smoker. For our smoker, the Little Chief, we used about 3 pan's worth of chips* (that you insert in the bottom) over the 12 hour period. We put the last one in before bed and let it work its magic overnight.
* if you have wood chips around, you don't need to buy specialized smoking chips, you just need the wood to be a good wood for smoking. Fruit woods like apple and cherry are often used but so are alder, mesquite and hickory. - 45-60 minutes
Pop the pork in a preheated oven at 90C/195F for 45 min - 1 hr. You want the internal temperature to be 68C/155F to ensure that your bacon is safe to eat.
Remove skin while the bacon is still warm - you may need the assistance of a sharp knife - and discard the skin.
For short term storage, wrap well and keep in the fridge.
For longer term storage, vacuum seal a whole piece for the freezer or suck the air out of another Ziploc bag and use that to freeze.
This recipe can be scaled up to produce larger amounts of bacon which we often do because if the smoker is going, you might as well!
