The cold smoked bacon is ready for consumption. This is what it looks like:

It turned out absolutely delicious. The 36 hour cold smoke, and the subsequent hanging in the basement, means that the flavour is highly concentrated, so a little goes a long way.

Here’s how to do it

Wait for fall. You’ll need low ambient temperatures, ideally in the low sixties, for this to work. Any higher, and the meat might spoil. You don’t want frost either, a cool fall day is perfect.

Start with a generous amount of pork belly. Mr. Stephenson and myself tend to buy an entire belly, partly because the result will be delicious and freezes well, partly because, if you’re anything like us, you’ll end up giving much of the bacon away to grateful friends. A man carrying smoked pork products is a man who’s welcome in most people’s houses and a slab of home smoked bacon beats a bottle of wine as a host present.

Cure the bacon as you would for the hot smoked version. The making bacon video shows you how. I use Michael Ruhlman’s basic cure, salt, sugar and a small amount of pink salt both for flavour and to make sure that botulism isn’t an option. Dredge the belly in the cure until well covered, then put into large ziplock bags and add any further flavourings.

I made three different spice cures, one with smoked paprika, one with fennel and one with a Syrian sausage spice mix I’ve bought some time back in a Turkish store in Scarborough. Cure the meat in the fridge for three days, turning it daily. The salt will start pulling liquid out of the meat almost instantly, by the end of day three there should be a fair amount of brine in the bag and the meat should feel quite a bit stiffer.

After  three or four days take the meat out of the brine and rinse with cold water. Poke a hole in it and tie a piece of string, so you can hang it. I hang my bellies into the unlit smoker, where I leave them to dry for 24 hours. Obviously this only works when the temperatures are low enough, if it’s too warm dry the meat in the fridge.

Light your smoker. I built a smoke house during the summer, I generate smoke with a smoke bullet from porkypas.com. Truth be told it took me a couple of tries to get the hang of it, but now I get consistent smoke times – without the bullet requiering attention – of four hours and up.

And that’s almost the end of it. Smoke the bacon for about 36 hours. I tend to smoke over a weekend. I start the smoker up at about 8:00 in the morning, then keep it going until close to midnight when I give it one last fill and go to bed. The next morning I clean the bullet out, refill it and let it run for another day.

Once smoked to your satisfaction, take the bacon out of the smoker. Sprinkle the meat side generously with cracked pepper, wrap in cheesecloth and hang in a dark, cool place – a basement is ideal – for about four to six weeks. The bacon will dry out and continue to cure. When the meat feels reasonably firm, the bacon is ready to eat.