Oh Bacon, How I Love Thee!

One of the joys of the Farmers Market is that I get to actually talk to the farmers.  Many of them find me amusing because I get so excited about food... about their food.  The guy from Cedarbrook Organic Farm near Harper's Ferry, West Virginia who has a stand at the Dupont Farmers Market is one of my favorite.  Although he has a diversified organic farm, he specializes in raising organic free range pigs which he sells at the Farmers Market.  He also gets just about as excited about his meat as I do.  He always asks me what my plans are for each cut of meat I buy.  So when I told him I've always wanted to make my own bacon, he not-so-casually mentioned that he also sold pork belly.  While I managed to resist the temptation that week, I knew I was simply postponing the inevitable... it took me just one more week to break down and buy a 3.5 slab of pork belly.  This is not a big surprise because anyone who has spent any sort of time with me knows that I love bacon. 

And so, I made my venture into Hickory Smoked Maple Bacon, and it was a delicious success despite a few missteps along the way.  The limp thin slices which line store bought packages pale in the shadow of this thick cut slab bacon.  To be perfectly honest, this even beats the fancy bacon Whole Foods stocks at their meat counter.  The hardest part, smoking the bacon, is time consuming but well worth the effort when doing a large batch.  I have enough bacon to last me and Boy at least four to six months for minutes a day during the curing process and one three hour stint to smoke the thing. 

There are basically two main steps in making bacon:  (1) cure the pork belly in some combination of salt and flavorings and (2) smoke the pork belly. 

Curing is remarkably easy.  I used about 1/4 cup of kosher salt, 1/4 cup of brown sugar, and 1/4 cup of maple syrup for my cure.   I rubbed this all over a 3 pound piece of pork belly (skin on) and then stashed the pork belly in a big tupperware container.   I actually had cut off about 1/2 pound of the little end of the belly to cure with just salt to make lardons.   I didn't know it was called lardons until this bacon making journey, but these are little strips of bacon browned to add flavor to other savory dishes.  I figured the maple would not necessarily taste great say, in a pasta dish.  Over the next 5 to 7 days, the meat cures in the fridge.  I flipped the meat over about once a day or once every other day, dumping out the fluid which the salt has drawn out and sprinkling a pinch of salt if a lot of fluid had been removed.  Each day, the meat gets firmer and firmer as the salt draws out the moisture.

Once the belly is cured, rinse the belly really well under cold water.  In order to avoid super salty bacon, I actually soaked mine in cold water for about 20 minutes and then patted dry.   The big question was how to smoke this thing in my urban apartment, which is actually a basement apartment in a 3 unit townhouse.  I'm lucky enough at least have a yard and a stoop to work with.  Now, you can bake this for 3 hours at 200 degrees in an oven to finish off the pork (or until the internal temperature is 150 degrees), but you won't get the lovely flavor that smoking imparts.  And while I had dreams of rigging up Alton Brown's homemade smoker, it proved to be cheaper and easier to buy a cheap $30 grill.  My initial rigging was to pile the charcoal on one side and put dry hickory chips in tin foil and puncture holes in the top to let the smoke come through.  The bacon should be laid skin side down on the side where there is no coals so it gets indirect heat from the smoke.  Unfortunately, the tin foil method did not work so well.  Mostly because my charcoal wasn't lit properly and didn't produce enough heat to make the wood smoke.

And so I ended up just dumping a mixture of hickory chips I had soaked in water and dry hickory chips directly on the charcoal and my bacon was enveloped in a beautiful cloud of smoke.  I covered the grill keeping the bottom vents open, and the top vents half open and turned to the opposite side of the grill the coals were so the smoke would draw up over the belly.  The tiny little snafoo was that since I had woken up at 5 am to smoke this away from the heat of the day, I was tired and my coals hadn't burned off all the lighter fluid yet, so I had a few minutes of lighter fluid smoke mixed in with the hickory smoke. Oops.  I stuck a thermometer inside the lid through the top vent to ensure it stayed at a happy 180 - 200 degrees.  The hardest part of this step is that you need to monitor your chips, coal, and temperature for about 3 hours.  Next time, I'll do it with a friend and a couple beers.

Once the bacon is done, stick it in the fridge so it can cool down and its easier to slice.  Next time I might actually stick it in the freezer for about 30 minutes after it is cool because I still had some difficulties cutting the bacon.  Cut the skin off as close to the skin as possible to keep all the luscious fat on the slab. Not that it was really bad, I ended up with some really thick bacon, but it would have been nice to keep the slices just a tiny bit thinner.  All said and done, the lighter fluid taste is barely noticeable given the magicness of the bacon itself.  Next time I'll take better care to make sure I wait for my coal to be perfectly ready. 

I presliced my entire slab and sealed each thick piece separately in some press n' seal, and then rolled the whole bit up for easy storage.  That way I can just cut one piece out at a time as I use it without having to expose the other pieces.