Tastes like Bacon

So it was quite easy and tasty to boot. After letting the pork cure for about a week, I smoked it today. I used apple wood chips and smoked the little piggie at around 225 degrees for 2 hours and then left it in the big green egg an additional 20 minutes (without smoke)to reach an internal temperature of 150 degrees. I added more damp wood chips about every 20 minutes, except for the last 20 minutes. I probably could have stopped adding wood chips 40 minutes sooner.

After taking the bacon out of the grill, I trimmed off the skin and tried some of the meat left on the skin. I was a bit worried because it tasted more like cured ham than bacon. Since we had bacon(I hoped), we decided on “breakfast-for-dinner” and so we had bacon and eggs. Once in the frying pan, it smelled like bacon and once on the plate it tasted like bacon. Success. If only everything in life was as simple as converting a piece of fresh pork bellie into bacon.

Pre-CurePost-Cure, 8 ounces of liquid was removed from the pork by the dry cure.  Post Smoking Skin side Sliced Bacon Tastes like bacon and didn’t shrink or curl up. It was difficult cutting thin slices, but I prefer thicker slabs of bacon anyway. It wasn’t as salty as some supermarket brands, had a nice smoky taste, was sweet enough, maybe a tad too sweet, but I didn’t taste the maple. So next time I would skip the brown sugar and use just maple sugar added to the dry cure and expose it to less smoke.

We didn’t finish all the slices we cut and cooked today (they were thick and meaty) and we saved part of the remaining slab for other breakfasts and cut some chunks for general cooking use. Looking forward to making more bacon.

The only drawback was that I smelled of smoke all day.