Making your own bacon

[KamadoSimon]

Decided to give this a go & found this website: http://countryskillsblog.wordpress.com/ ... ng-at-hom/

Bought my curing salt from these guys: http://www.weschenfelder.co.uk

Some pork belly purchased, it went into a food bag with the salt & a little black cracked pepper for two day. As per the instructions, some pickle formed (brown liquid - water drawn out of the meat by the salt) & I drained this after two days, applied the rest of the rub & left for a further 3 days. It got turned over in the fridge between once and three times a day - basically whenever I went to the fridge & remembered.

On the fifth day of Christmas..... sorry, on the fifth day, I removed the belly pork from the bag (lots more pickle had formed), rinsed it in fresh water, dried with a paper cloth & left uncovered in the fridge for 24 hours - it then got wrapped in parchment paper & was used at the weekend.

I'm not normally a streaky bacon fan - but this was in a totally different league. Sooooo tasty & so easy. Have a look through Kate's site linked above - really helpful.

Home made bacon cut into fairly thick slices:


Home made bacon - belly of pork cut - half left:


Home made bacon cooked:

[keith157]

Nice post, and some good looking bacon, I take it you got none of the phospate water (white sticky residue) when you cooked it?

[KamadoSimon]

None at all Keith - this was free-range belly of pork to which I simply added the curing salt & some black pepper. I even drained off & saved the bacon fat that was left in the skillet!

[keith157]

You mean you didn't dip the bread in it for your sarnie

[London Irish]

Wow wow wow!!!!

Definitely going to give this a go!!! Thanks for the post Simon!!!

[aris]

I used to make bacon all the time. It was fantastic - particularly if you let it dry/mature for a couple of weeks in the fridge. You do need a lot of fridge space though to make the quantities required for such tasty bacon. A meat slicer is useful too.

[bencops]

I've made it a few times and have problems getting the salt levels right - either too salty but amazing, or not too salty but not cured enough.

And yes, cutting it is hard - a meat slicer would be essential if you did it all the time!

[KamadoSimon]

I quite like the chunky cuts - especially with my newly razor sharp knives. Not going to be doing this more than once or twice a month - so meat slicer isn't going to make it onto the must have list just yet

Regarding the salt - I did the cure at 10% i.e. used 10% of the meats weight to determine the amount of cure required, so 1kg meat = 100g cure. My cure was 4 parts (80g) supracure to one part brown sugar (20g) plus a tea spoon of pepper. The instructions that came with the supracure suggested 5% - so I could have done a 50/50 salt / sugar cure. Kate who runs the blog above said that she is using circa 7% in her maple cures - so maybe I'll do that next rather than step right down to 5%.

Regardless, this was some of the best bacon I have ever had - so it'll definitely get done again.

[aris]

I used a bespoke bacon curing mix from sausagemaking.org. Takes all the guesswork out of it - just add x grams of cure per kilo of belly pork, put in a ziploc bag and let it cure for a week or so, then wash the bacon in water, pat dry, then allow it to mature uncovered in the fridge for another week or two. The scraggly bits which do not make good slices of bacon make great pachetta bits for cooking. The kind of stuff you pay a fortune for in the shops. And this Bacon doesn't shrink as it is dry cured and not pumped with water and gunk to increase some faceless multinationals profits.

It really is that easy.

[keith157]

Simon & Aris did either of you keep the skin on for curing the belly?