Hey gang… behold my belly!  9 lbs of fresh organic berkshire pork from my butcher

While everyone else was out enjoying the gorgeous day in Vancouver I’ve been slaving away at home cleaning my house. Made a nice batch of iced tea, went out shopping, picked up some good looking pork chops from my butcher for me and B who then bailed on dinner (boo) and keeping me company. Company you ask? I needed someone to keep me busy while I smoked a 5 pound pork belly. It’s my first shot at something from Charcuterie and one I’ve been looking to do for awhile. I’ve done bacon once before and it turned out ok. And by ok I mean it didn’t kill me. It was horridly salty. Different technique this time. A 7 day brine in:

• 1/4 cup kosher salt
• 2 teaspoons pink salt / prague powder #1 / instacure #1 or whatever it’s called in your area
• 1/4 cup maple sugar or dark brown sugar
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1 5-pound pork belly, skin on

I mixed all the dry ingredients and mixed for awhile then mixed in the maple syrup. Rubbed it all over the belly. Tossed in a giant ziplock bag with all the cure that was left over. Rubbed  it around for awhile. Refrigerated it, turning the belly and redistributing the cure (now a liquid brine) every other day, for 7 days. At this point the meat was pretty firm. Remove the belly from the cure, wash it well under cold water, pat dry and put back in the fridge uncovered for another day. Then… well, it’s time to choose your wood. I went for a mixture of 75% hickory and 25% apple, as that’s what I had on hand. Hot-smoke the belly on a weber for about 3 hours (to a internal temp of 150 F).

I have a little chief smoker that I use for smoked salmon that became the bacon smoker in this case. It doesn’t quite get hot enough in there for 150F (I got to about 115F), so after three hours of smoking I threw it in a low oven @ 225 until I hit an internal temperature of 150F.

Let the belly cool and then cut off the skin leaving as much fat as possible. Let it cool, wrap it in plastic and fridge/freezer until you want to use it.

I wish I had a meat slicer as cutting slices with a knife is a bitch. I semi-froze most of it and sliced it into thin slices (approx. thick cut, actually didn’t do a half bad job) and then wrapped breaky/dinner sized portions very well and stuck in the freezer.  This stuff JUST froze which is probably due to the depression of the freezing temperature from the salt.

Luckily, this stuff was done for Canada Day and my friends had no plans.  I set out the call for canada day brunch BLTs and drinks and stuffed my friends faces with my sketchy (to them) house cured hickory bacon.  The taste, well, the taste was awesome!  Not the best bacon I’ve had but certainly some of the better bacon I’ve had the pleasure of eating.  The best bacon still goes to the bacon found once in a brunch sandwich at Fuel.  Damn.  That stuff was good.  This stuff was certainly worth the experience and much better than the stuff you would get in a supermarket.  Different.  Very, very smokey due to the harshness of the hickory.  Sweeter and saltier too.  Texture was good, crisp, but still a bit of chew.  The bacon did not shrink very much in the pan and surprisingly rendered only a small amount of fat for the 4ish pounds I cooked up for everyone.  Everyone loved it and was suitably amazed.  I have serious street cred now in food amongst my friends.  People I barely know at school heard about my bacon and deemed it badass as well.  Gogo science experiments.  This is certainly one I will repeat from now on but more playing with the cure and trying various woods and combinations there of.  I think a lightler, softer, fruiter wood will be next to tone down the extreme smokey flavour from the hickory.  Still, it made for a damn good BLT.

-m, out.

sidenote:  who the hell is Luhr Jensen and why is he on my smoker?