Bacon

[Jay]

last Sunday, when we went to the asian store in Austin, I got five pounds of pork belly. Cured it in kosher salt, pepper, and real maple syrup for a week. Cooked some of it this morning, SOOO much better than store bought bacon....





didn't use curing salt (potassium nitrate) so its not so pink... read a bunch of stuff about curing home bacon; may use salt next time (botulism). Bing wasn't alarmed (your just cooking meat thats been under refrigeration a week).

 

[MasterQ]

WOW!

So how to you get a smoky flavor to it?

Would a cold smoker work?

It's pork so perhaps that is dangerous.

Maybe just a few hours in a warm smoker then refrigerate?

Perhaps I need to do some googling hehe.

Gratz bro!

Looks really tasty. I am craving a BLT now! Thanks!

-Q

 

[Jay]

WOW!

So how to you get a smoky flavor to it?

Would a cold smoker work?

It's pork so perhaps that is dangerous.

Maybe just a few hours in a warm smoker then refrigerate?

Perhaps I need to do some googling hehe.

Gratz bro!

Looks really tasty. I am craving a BLT now! Thanks!

-Q

spent literally hours reading about how to smoke/cure your own bacon. Many, many, many articles about curing/smoking etc and no mention of botulism or potassium nitrites. Then all of a sudden I hit a bunch of articles about how dangerous it is to smoke the bacon without a preservative etc etc. My wife (Bing) just laughed that off and said she/asia has been using salt to cure meat/fish for thousands of years and its just refrigerated meat anyway. So what if I called it a pork roast instead of a pork belly? Then I wouldn't mind it being refrigerated for a week. The end result was I opted to used the oven method (200 degrees for two hours) rather than smoke it in a smoker. After that you take the skin off and refrigerate overnight for easy slicing. (skin pulls right off). I slathered it with maple syrup (real stuff, not colored HFCS that the grocery store calls syrup) two days prior. I am more than satisfied with the results, with the exception that next time I will soak in cold water for a half day prior to slicing/cooking to take out more salt. To me, it was slightly salty, but no one else seemed to mind.