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.

Mmmmm Bacon*

Just made a batch of bacon. Seems easy to do, let’s hope it tastes good. First difficult item to procure was the curing salt, difficult to get just a few ounces. Curing salt #1 or pink salt, is dyed pink and is 93.75 % salt with 6.25% nitrite added. It can be ordered online and for the amount I wanted the shipping was more than the item cost. Next, it was difficult to get the pork bellie for the bacon. Finally was able to get some today at Fairway market in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I tried several local butchers and pork stores and tried Western beef(that was an almost) and also tried Whole foods which was an almost as well.

First you mix up a batch of a dry cure which is one part pink salt, 4 parts sugar, 8 parts kosher salt. Put the pig in a ziplock bag, add 1/4 cup of the dry cure. Shake it all about. Add some seasoning (I did 1/4 cup maple sugar, 1/4 cup brown sugar) and then let it sit in the fridge for a week. It is supposed to firm up as it cures. After it cures you can put it in a 200 degree oven for 2 hours or until the internal temperature gets to 150 degrees or smoke it to the same temperature. I plan on smoking it, not sure which wood I plan to use. I have several different bags of wood chips that I received for Christmas one year. I’ll probably go with something subtle. Like me. The ingredients.Looks like bacon already and I didn’t do a thing. A 2.87 pound slab of pork bellie.I have to say, the skin side looks kinda gross, it gets discarded later. I had a rucksack made of pigskin. It was very nice.Finished product for today, just wait, smoke and eat.  

I have a day off today, so I am making the most of it.

*Credit to The Simpsons

Second Spring Flower

And I was wrong on both accounts. The second was another bunch of Snowdrops, peeking up out of the snow. How pretty.

This guy seems to be asking to be pulled out of the snow.

The rest of the yard is covered in snow and looks pretty blah. So I am planning on ordering a couple of red stemmed dogwoods for the back yard. I’ll put one in to the left of the Lilac in the corner

and another in the vicinity of the down spout where we have a bed of Peonies. A friend has them in her yard and I think they will add some color to the yard.I also plan on ordering more Cyclamen for the Peony bed as well. The flowers in late summer into fall and the foliage through the winter months looks nice. Except when covered in snow.

Trudee guarding the castle during the blizzard.