Homemade Bacon

I have attempted bacon before with both pork and beef.  My first try, with pork, was horrible!  One of the salts I used, to flavor the first side of pork, rendered the pork not only to salty but tasting of dirt.  I was mortified.  I took a year off from curing till now to retry.

I now share with you a very simple curing recipe for a well-marbled fatty bit of belly.

Ingredients:

1 Cups Kosher salt

1/2-1 Cup Sugar

1 tsp pink salt (enough for 5lb slab of meat)

1 Tbs juniper berries smooooooshed.

Redaction:

Gather your meat and salts/spices together.

Here I used a rough grained Kosher salt, regular table, sugar, juniper berries and pink salt.  When I originally made this, I erred on the side of too much salt.  I did a 2 to 1 of salt to sugar which is the right ratio but too much of the salt when rubbing.

Take your salts, spice and sugars and mix them together very well.

Next rub this over your meat on both sides.

Place in a large container.  Flip the meat every day or every other day.  The juice is part of the brine.

On the 7th day, rinse all the salts/sugar/spices off the meat in cool flowing water for 20 minutes.  This step is VERY important.  If you don’t rinse the salt off very well, the meat will be cooked with the salt on and rendered to salty.

Place on a very low heat smoker/grill.  I used hard wood charcoal.  It really does have a better cooking temperature, longevity and better flavor then the regular briquettes.  The grill I used is very nice…I managed to keep the temperature between 140 most of the time.  Occasionally it creeped up to 200 and I had to open the dampers up to cool it off.

The meat smoked for 5(ish) hours.

The meat cut nicely…still not store bought thin, but I didn’t need thin, I needed tasty.  The final verdict is that the outer skin was a bit salty but very tasty.