Bringing Home the Bacon

Lettuce – who cares…

Right on. Lettuce is a garnish. Looks pretty and then you dump it.

BTW: Egg is a suitable lettuce replacement – IMO.

🙂

EvanJames said :

rosscoact said :

Best bacon by far is the bacon you cure and smoke yourself and it’s really a piece of cake

A piece of loin or belly (depending on your preference), a ziplok bag, bacon cure (available online in small quantities) and a hooded barbeque and you’re apples. One week from butcher to the best bacon sarnie you’ve ever had…..and no polyphosphates, MSG, imitation smoke flavour or even nitrates/nitrites if that’s your thing.

Um, the bacon cure contains nitrite. It’s also often called pink salt, or cure #-something, and it’s the same, a slightly dodgy chemical. It’s encouraging to see more small operators are curing without nitrite, just salt and sugar.

Correct, which is why I said ‘even’ in my original comment. If you want pink coloured bacon and for it to not need freezing you need curing salt. I use nitrates because causing food poisoning of your friends and family is a bad thing. There is so much nitrates in vegetables that the small amounts I use in bacon perhaps doesn’t really make much of a difference.

I’ve made bacon with saltpetre (nitrate) but it’s easier going to the butcher and asking for curing salt which is simply sodium nitrate mixed with salt.

I just make up a couple of kilos of seasoned dry cure at a time.
Rub pieces of belly with the dry rub.
Vacuum seal in a bag, leave for about 4 days for 25mm thick belly. turn daily
Remove from bag, you now have green bacon
Rinse off, fry a piece to taste the bacon for saltyness
soak in cold water if too salty
dry uncovered in the fridge for a day
smoke in a smoker or in a covered barbeque until 160f
It’s now cooked (alternatively cold smoke for 36 hours or so, but it wont be cooked)
slice and vacuum pack and pull out at the appropriate time to the adoring fans

Not that this type of bacon will have more delicious fat rendering out and cooks much quicker than supermarket (and some butchers BTW) bacon with polyphosphates in it.

For value, Costco has proper baconer belly for streaky bacon which is hands down the best bacon IMHO. the problem with looking for old breed and free range pigs is that they don’t let them grow into big baconers. Get a female pig if you can, Jordos and chinese butchers have them and they do taste better. My preference is for pigs that haven’t been fed fishmeal because the fish smell in pork can be overpowering for me (same with eggs but that’s another story).

muntychops said :

The butcher shop (that’s what it’s called) in Dickson shops has the best bacon in Canberra, (they won a pork council award for it) my grandfather was a butcher and its the closest I’ve come to tasting bacon like he used to make. They smoke it on the premises and its amazing.

+1

the dickson butchers are close to old school – my old man was an old school butcher – ie could still fucntion when the power saw wasn’t working – and my only complaint w/ dickson is they don’t make brawn. never found anything to come close to the old man’s (well, the old lady’s often enough, truth be told!)

Bacon-making guide mentioned above:
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=918108
Note the cat stalking the bacon in the kitchen shot.

also this one I have found invaluable (even printed it out):
http://www.3men.com/bacon_making.htm

although google or chrome tells me the site will damage my computer. Not sure what that’s all about. the page is referenced in every other bacon-making site on the entire internet.

rosscoact said :

Best bacon by far is the bacon you cure and smoke yourself and it’s really a piece of cake

A piece of loin or belly (depending on your preference), a ziplok bag, bacon cure (available online in small quantities) and a hooded barbeque and you’re apples. One week from butcher to the best bacon sarnie you’ve ever had…..and no polyphosphates, MSG, imitation smoke flavour or even nitrates/nitrites if that’s your thing.

Um, the bacon cure contains nitrite. It’s also often called pink salt, or cure #-something, and it’s the same, a slightly dodgy chemical. It’s encouraging to see more small operators are curing without nitrite, just salt and sugar.

For a small section of belly, like the bits you buy from Coles, a wet brine cure takes a short week. I prefer wet brining as it’s quick and simple and you can control the end saltiness better. The blokes who run the Bratwurst stall at the Bus Depot Markets however prefer to dry cure, which is what is described above. You put your sugar, salt, cure if you’re using it in with the pork in a baggie, but you have to take it out every day or so, clean off the pink liquid coming out and replenish the cure.

Then you rinse it, let it dry in the fridge so it gets a sort-of shiny sheen (from the salt), and then smoking time. Most bacon sold in Australia is cooked, it’s not a raw meat any more. if you hot smoke it, it’ll cook it too. I prefer the north american cold smoking, which leaves the meat raw (if you’ve ever seen US or Canadian cryovacced bacon, it’s expressing blood).

The smoking is mainly for flavour, the salt (or cure if you’ve used it) does the preserving.

I’ve found numerous guides to makin’ bacon on the ‘net, one of the best ones was on Overclockers! But the various BBQ forums have heaps too, and the yanks tend to be mines of information although nitrite-free curing makes them nervous.

Bacon is surprisingly easy, and you end up with a pretty smoky bacon. Befriend a butcher and get them to do you a loin with the belly attached, and you’ll be able to make bacon shaped like the one in the picture above.

rosscoact said :

Best bacon by far is the bacon you cure and smoke yourself and it’s really a piece of cake

A piece of loin or belly (depending on your preference), a ziplok bag, bacon cure (available online in small quantities) and a hooded barbeque and you’re apples. One week from butcher to the best bacon sarnie you’ve ever had…..and no polyphosphates, MSG, imitation smoke flavour or even nitrates/nitrites if that’s your thing.

I have a smoker at home – a barrel like version of the kettle bbq (which I also have), but I’ve never had much success with it. I had to hunt down the instructions online and I just couldn’t work out how long to leave something in there. I had a bash with salmon and whilst it cooked and tasted o.k, it was not that attractive to look at. Don’t know what I did wrong – maybe inconsistent?

On the lettuce front…wouldn’t use iceberg as it’s a bit too watery. I’d go oak I think.

Good butchers – the one at Griffith would defintely cut slices to suit, and I think he smokes his own.

The butcher shop (that’s what it’s called) in Dickson shops has the best bacon in Canberra, (they won a pork council award for it) my grandfather was a butcher and its the closest I’ve come to tasting bacon like he used to make. They smoke it on the premises and its amazing.

I’ll second Andy in Spence, great butcher, great meat, great bloke.
Talking of bacon, National Bacon Week is also coming up in early March, celebrating bacon and helping consumers choose Australian bacon over the 80% of bacon sold in Australia that’s made from imported pork.

Another recommendation for another source of good bacon (and more) is Jordo’s Chop Shop in Wanniassa. He smokes it himself, and also has pork belly, bacon chops and bacon steaks as well. And you can buy it at the shop, or buy online and have it delivered. Great meat, great service, and now I could really go a great BLT myself.

georgesgenitals said :

[So… you gunna post a recipe or just tease us…? 🙂

Well, if you’re really keen to do it yourself, the potassium nitrate salts originally used to cure bacon were derived from ashes, horse manure, and human urine. Basically just let it react for a couple of weeks, wash the resulting mess with water, filter the output and then boil off the liquid to produce the salt.