Me and my wife originally tried smoking our own bacon out of sheer novelty after finding out we could buy whole pork bellies at costco. It then turned out so good we’ve kept up with making a new batch anytime we run out.
Not pictured: trimming the pork belly small enough to fit in a vacuum bag, coating it with a curing mix (borrowed from this Kenji video on pancetta), vacuum sealing, and keeping under weights in the fridge for a week.
On the smoker:
Sliced:
Packed up:
The off cuts on a “whatever’s in the fridge” sandwich:
ohai, a fellow bacon maker!
i make 3 sides at a time and freeze the lot in vacuum sealed bags, about a pound or pound and a half in each. i leave them unsliced and cut what i need as i need it, resealing the vacuum bag each time.
my recipe is:
per pork belly:
- 186g brown sugar
- 9g black pepper
- 78g kosher salt
- 16g apple spice rub
- 32g curing salt
getting even slices is a pain so i actually cut the belly in half length wise prior to curing for a week. i find it much easier to get uniform, super thick cut slices that way. 3 sides is enough to get my and my extended family’s households through most of a year!
this is the last batch i made, before settling on cutting it in half down the middle. applewood smoked
That looks great! We actually don’t add any flavorings into the mix outside of the salt + sugar, we did originally but found out we really liked the very smokey without anything added. I should really go back and try out some different options to see what’s out there though.
We also usually smoke with “neighbor maple”. Which is to say anytime a storm comes through a branches fall out of the big maple tree in our neighbor’s lawn, we take it, chop it up, and smoke stuff with it.
Slicing is both the easiest and most annoying part of the process for me. A few years ago we managed to get a hold of a second hand commercial deli slicer. It works incredibly well, as you might imagine, but then I discovered why you usually don’t have commercial equipment in your home. I use it maybe once every couple months, and it takes about as long to clean the dang thing as it does to actually slice something on it. I’m sure it makes sense in an actual butcher or deli where you’re using it all day, but for me I do 15 minutes of slicing and then have 15 minutes of cleaning off pork fat. It sure does make nice even slices of bacon though.
My dad buys about 3 times per year whole pig/ half pig/ game (hog or deer) and then with friends completely prepares it.
We then have sausages, bacon, lot of meat, few liters of blood soup…
That sounds fantastic. I have some relatives that hunt, and I have not taken enough advantage of that.
Gotta set up a deal where they give me meat and I return half of it in the form of bacon or sausage.
How do you store it once it’s packed? And what do the stars mean on those two?
They go in the freezer, and when we want to use a pack we just toss it into the fridge the day before.
The stars are because I ran out of the good plastic wrap (each has a layer of cling film then layer of freezer paper), and had to do the final two with the bad plastic wrap. I’m less confident about how air tight they are so they’re starred so we eat them first.
Gotcha, it looks really good! Thanks for sharing
