Bacon Madness

From time to time I experience all-consuming food cravings. Generally they are for foods that fall into the savory, the salty, the fatty, and more often than not, the porky categories. I refer to this phenomenon as my madness. They’re not normal cravings because actually getting the desired food item does not satiate them. I once craved Buffalo wings for a whole year or carnitas for a whole month. Portion after portion would not satisfy the craving, maybe I wasn’t getting enough animal fat in my diet. Yeah right! I have no explanation for it. It’s like getting a song stuck in your head. Yes that has happened to me too for ridiculously extended periods of time, wonder what that says about my personality?

For some reason it’s never enough to simply go to the store or to the restaurant and just get what I want. Maybe the craving is best satisfied if I’m consumed with creating that which I desire. Or maybe I have an idea of exactly what it should taste, look, smell, and feel like and unless I make it myself it won’t satisfy me. Being a cook, a tinkerer and lover of gadgets, appliances, and good old-fashioned ingenuity, this process usually involves elaborate contraptions and repetitive preparations in search of perfection. Hence the necessity for items such as deep fryers, handmade tortilla presses, or plumbing supply cold-smoke generators.

Of course one of my greatest culinary loves and the focus of much obsession is bacon. Everything is better with bacon. I want it, I need it, I have to have it. So the only natural recourse is to make it myself.

It started with a phone call to Liehs & Steigerwald:

“Hi, I’m calling about pork belly, is that something you normally have or do I need to special order it?”

“You have to order it, it comes in every Thursday.”

“Great, can I order any amount?”

“Just tell us how much you need and whether you want bones removed.”

“I’ll take five pounds, no bones.”

“OK, give me your name and phone number and it will be ready on Thursday.”

“Perfect”

The next week I had five pounds of pork belly burning a hole in my pocket and was one step closer to that porky grail, bacon. First step was to rinse, dry, and pack the meat with cure. I searched around and found a recipe for a basic bacon cure. Only problem was that it was enough to cure five whole pork bellies so some adjustment was in order. The final recipe looked like this:

1 lb salt (I used pickling salt)

.25 lb brown sugar

2 tsp pink salt (Prague Powder #1 – sodium nitrate – I ordered some online at the Savory Spice Shop).

2 tbsp black pepper

Once the pork was tucked in to the cure I put it on a plastic rack and stuck it in a pyrex dish uncovered in the fridge. It sat for a couple of days and lost a lot of its water weight. After about three days I drained off the water, repacked it with cure and put it back on the rack uncovered. It spent the next three weeks in the fridge curing.

Once I was certain that the pork had given up all of the liquid it could, I brought it back out of the fridge for the next phase. At this point it was hard to touch and dense, the outside had the consistency of jerky. It could go right into the smoker, but there is so much salt in the meat that it’s best to soak or “freshen” it. I soaked it for about four hours and then removed it and patted it dry. After this step it is necessary to dry everything out again and have the meat form a pellicle, a tacky sealed surface that helps keep in the moisture and aids the smoke in adhering to the meat. I put it back on the rack and returned it to the fridge for about three days.

When the weekend rolled around I fired up the cold smoke generator with hickory chunks (newly fitted with an air brush compressor to force enough air into the chamber to keep the smoldering wood from choking itself out) and got the meat into the smoke box. The pork spent about four hours in the smoke and then I returned it to the fridge to bloom, which apparently finishes off the process and lets the smoke settle in to the meat.

I left the meat alone for awhile until I finally got around to dealing with it again – slicing it was a big job and I knew I’d have to vacuum seal and freeze most of it so I put it a off for a few days – I can’t believe I left it alone for that long.

After I sliced a mountain of bacon, I finally got some in the pan and cooked it until it was slightly chewy and a little crispy. I anxiously pulled out a piece and after setting it on a paper towel for only a few seconds I had to have a taste. It looked like bacon, it smelled like bacon . . . I bit into it and the smokiness was definitely there, it tasted porky, and a little sweet, and SALTY! Uh oh, it was way too salty. I guess I didn’t soak it long enough. Well, I guess I’ll be using this batch of bacon as ingredients in other recipes for a while. I plan to soak some of the sliced stuff next time I thaw some out and see if that reduces the salinity some, maybe I can salvage this batch for eating out of hand after all.

Lesson learned, but in the end I was still pretty proud of myself and will happily choke down the salty goodness if for no other reason than to enjoy my accomplishment. All-in-all even though it takes quite a long time for the whole curing process, the actual time invested was not too bad – ten minutes here and there so I think I’ll be trying this again. It fits in nicely with my obsessing until I reach perfect technique, and hell, it’s bacon so it’s definitely worth it!