Bacon is the best! Everything is better with bacon. I’m not talking about all these silly bacon ice creams and chocolate bars that are flooding the specialty stores right now – I’m talking about braises, stews, soups and long walks on the beach. It is the most adored of all the meats. I have seen more than one hardcore vegetarian friend  jump off the vegetable truck and dive into the waiting, loving, tasty arms of bacon. Its great to eat out of the pan but I think its truly excellent as an ingredient. I use it almost like a spice. A single nice slice of bacon in a stew adds depth and richness that is incomparable.

Having heard the call of the home-cured bacon last year, both myself and my esteemed colleague Mr. Duess, became interested in making our own. As it was winter we started with unsmoked, dried pancetta which was very tasty and satifying (we’ll do an article on it in the fall/winter once it gets cold enough to dry hanging in the basement or an outdoor shed).  I would say, though, that my first smoked bacon was nothing short of a revelation. Its totally different – about a million times better – than commercial supermarket bacon. It makes commercial bacon seem like a hollow anemic meat husk – a salty snake skin – if one could or would ever imagine such a thing.

Firstly, a clue to its quality and fullness of flavour, homemade bacon doesn’t shrink in the pan. Whereas supermarket bacon is pumped full of brine to cure it as quickly as possible and plump it up for maximum profit, homemade bacon is simply coated with a cure/spice mix and allowed to rest in the natural brine that develops. Its flavour is rich, meaty and where-have-you-been-all-my-life delicious.

The second advantage is that you can spice your bacon in any manner that you might wish – we’ve done all sorts of sweet, savory and pungent bacons. A simple guide:  if you’re going to slice it, fry it and eat it out of the pan, sweet is really nice. If you’re planning to use it as an ingredient in your stews etc, then savory is quite nice. Of course you can swap these two directions around but this guideline is a good place to start.

The third and other big advantage to home made bacon is that you can slice it anyway you wish. If you want lardons for a salad, chunks for a stew, or slivers for barding, you can cut your own from a nice slab of homemade bacon to make it all possible.

20 lbs of Spring Creek Farms pork belly.

Traditionally, bacon starts with the noble and most tasty pork belly. Choosing quality meat makes a huge difference here. Buying from a provider who you can trust to provide you with pork bellies that are from small local farms and/or organic is important. You can really taste the difference. Making bacon is not an effortless process so it makes sense to go for the best base you can start with. I buy my bellies here in Toronto from either from Spring Creek Farms, Twin Creek Farms or Rowe Meats.

Today’s bellies are from Spring Creek Farms. I got two bellies weighing about 10 lbs each. I’ve cut them into 3-5 lbs chunks so that they are easier to manage. This also allows me to measure the proper proportion of cure for each, and I can fit them easily in large plastic bags for the curing period.

Next step is to mix an apply the cure. There are a bunch of ways of doing this. If you surf around you’ll find all manner of recipes and techniques. I’m using a method based on a recipe in Micheal Ruhlmann’s Charcouterie. We’ll review this book later, but the short story is that it is an excellent, interesting, and well written resource – a great place to start if you’re interested in curing meats. Essentially the idea is to coat your bellies with just as much “dry cure” as will stick to the surface. We’ll discuss the whole nitrite, no nitrite issue in a later post. For now I’ll just say that the use of a tiny little bit of nitrite is the safest way to go when your starting out – it just takes one case of botulism to totally kill the groovy ambiance at your next dinner party.

Rubbing the spice and cure in

If you’re mixing spices in with your cure, as I am here, you’ll want to mix them together with the cure so that they are evenly applied to the meat. This means pre-measuring. It takes about 50 grams or 1/4 cup of dry cure to coat a 3-5 lb chunk of belly. How much spice mix you put in is entirely up to you. When you’re smoking bacon, it really challenges the spice flavors so I go kind of heavy – 2ish tbsp per 3-5 lb piece of belly. Today, I’m doing a 5 spice inspired cinnamon extravaganza, a pancetta style spiced bacon, and a simple maple bacon (just add 1/4 ish cup of good quality maple syrup to your bacon when you put it into the curing bag).

The application of the cure/spices onto the bellies is really about rubbing the mixture in as much as you can. Really go for it – think neck massage rather than belly rub – even though you are rubbing bellies. Once you’ve coated the belly, put it in a ziplock bag or, if you have the technology, you can vacuum pack it. The idea is to leave as little air in the bag as possible so that the meat is in contact with the curing brine at all times.

The next stage is about waiting. This is Mr. Duess’s favorite part – waiting…he loooooooves to wait. The salt in the cure will cause the bellies to release a lot of liquid. This forms a kind of natural brine. In this version of curing bacon, you want the bellies to sit in this cure until the meat feel firm and dense rather than raw and squishy. This takes 4-7 days. I like a lighter cure so I tend to pull it out of the brine after about 5 days. Its important to to flip the bellies daily and give them a bit of a rub through the bag to ensure that the cure touching the meat is refreshed regularly. You can also place a weight on them too to assist the process.

Cinnamon, pancetta spiced and maple bacons bagged with cure.

Next weekend we’ll pull them all out of the fridge, let them dry for 24 hours and then smoke them in the most excellent Webber kettle bbq with “The Smokinator 1000″. Yes you read that right…1000.

Stephenson out.