Home cured BACON

By Dustin

If dealing with a 10-pound pork belly is daunting to you, you can get it in smaller chunks. I’ve not seen raw pork belly in smaller than 5-pound slabs, though.

Ingredients

• 1 large pork belly, about 10 pounds
• 1 heaping cup of kosher salt
• 4 teaspoons of Insta Cure No. 1 (this is sodium nitrite, and if you feel strongly about it, you can leave it out — but the meat will not keep as long and will turn gray)
• 1/2 cup dark or light brown sugar
• 1/4 cup freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup coarsely ground juniper berries (optional)
• 1/4 cup crumbled sage (I use wild California white sage)
• 2 tablespoons dried thyme

Details

Adapted from oregonlive.com

Preparation

Step 1

Trim the belly into pieces that will fit in a large plastic bag or lidded container. Make sure the sides are squared off; use the trim in sausages or a burger mix.

Mix the dry ingredients well.

Massage the salt mixture into the belly pieces well. Put them in their own individual plastic bags, or stack them in a plastic container — with any salt mixture that did not adhere to the meat. Put this in the refrigerator.

Every day, turn the meat over. It will leach moisture and you don’t want just one side sitting in the brine. Do this for 5 to 7 days, depending on: a) how thick the belly is, and b) how cured you want your bacon. If you leave it for much longer than a week, you will be getting into salt pork territory, and while salt pork is great, you cannot eat it by itself without soaking it in fresh water first. Conversely, a five-day cure will be cleaner-tasting but may not penetrate to the center of the belly — and the bacon will spoil faster.

After you’ve cured the meat, you can smoke it, hang it or eat it.

If you smoke it, run a hook through one corner of the belly and hang it in your smoker as far away from the heat source as possible. Get a very slow smoke going, and put ice cubes in the water tray. You want as cold a smoke as you can manage, even though you cannot really get a proper cold-smoke on a regular smoker. How long? Depends on the heat, but if you can keep the belly under 200 degrees you can go for up to four hours or so; I tend to like a light smoke, so I put my bacon in for only 90 minutes to 2 hours.
At any rate, cool the bacon thoroughly on a wire rack before cutting it further into storage pieces.

If you hang your bacon, make sure it is in a place that is no warmer than 60 degrees (50 is better) and is pretty humid, about 60 to 75 percent humidity. I’ve never hung bacon or pancetta for longer than a month this way, but I suppose you could hang it forever. It’ll get drier and more concentrated in flavor the longer you hang it. It may also develop mold. Remember this general rule: White mold is your friend, white fuzzy mold is neutral, green mold needs to be wiped away immediately with a cloth soaked in vinegar, and black mold means you toss the bacon.

To store your bacon, wrap it in butcher paper or vacuum seal it. If you are freezing your bacon, which I suspect you will once you’ve made 10 pounds of it, cut it into slabs you think you will eat within 10 days and freeze them. I highly recommend a vacuum sealer for this, but you can also wrap the bacon in plastic wrap, and then in either foil or freezer paper. Frozen, bacon lasts a year.