Perhaps one of the most beloved foods in our house is bacon. We've tried all kinds and like most of them. After reading up a bit, I learned that making bacon isn't really that complicated.

This is a pork belly.

Bacon is made from pork belly. To be clear, American bacon is cured and smoked pork belly, British back bacon is cured pork loin. I am American, so I make bacon from pork belly.

The first step is curing the pork belly with a dry cure of salt, sugar, and pink salt (sodium nitrite). The main purpose of the cure is to prevent any bacterial growth on the meat and draw out some water.

Let's remember that refrigeration is a relatively new invention. In the past, a big life problem was finding ways to preserve meat for use long after it was killed. Curing by salting, smoking, and drying are methods to prevent meat from spoiling. Making bacon was a way to save the pork belly for later use. Pork belly was also the main ingredient of salt pork, a mainstay of the military diet for centuries.

I triple bagged the meat and put it in the refrigerator to cure for a week.

After a week, I pulled the now cured pork belly out and washed it well. I patted it dry and prepared it for a smoke.

Traditionally, bacon is cold smoked. The goal is to apply smoke to the meat without cooking it. That means keeping the temperature well under 150° F. That's not easy to do in a traditional smoker. So, I built a cold smoker unit from my regular smoker and a trash can. I'll post more about that project.

Here is the cured pork belly being smoked. The goal is to get a good amount of flavor into the meat without cooking it.

I smoked it for about 3 hours. I measured the temperature and it didn't get above 120° F. I pulled it out and let it rest a bit and then put it in the fridge to cool.

After cooling down, I started slicing. Sure enough, it had the look, feel, and smell of bacon.

The real test was cooking it. I fried up a few slices and eagerly took a bite. Sure enough it was bacon.

I am very happy with the result. It's a lot of work to make bacon, from the curing time to the smoking, but I enjoyed the process. When I make it again, I'm going to try a maple syrup cure process to get a bit of a sweet flavor.

Give it a try, you'll have fun.

Posted by michael at April 21, 2009 09:19 PM