Thermoblog by Martin Earl
Bacon goes well with almost anything. It’s used in everything from sandwiches to chocolate—we haven’t found anything this versatile meat can’t do!
The art of curing meat dates from well before the dawn of refrigeration, all the way back to ancient civilizations as a way to preserve meat for long periods of time. Since those first ancient attempts, it has been perfected and made into nothing short of an art form.
Bacon is a staple in many cuisines and can be prepared in various ways, from cold-smoked German Speck to unsmoked Italian Guanciale to good old American apple smoked bacon. There are variations in how bacon is seasoned, as well, from salty and savory to sweet—a whole world of bacon possibilities just waiting for you to explore. But if you’ve never made your own smoked bacon from a slab of pork belly, that simple, satisfying preparation is definitely where you should start.
Here we present a basic cure for the bacon, but you can enhance it with any spices or herbs that you choose. A nice touch, for instance, is a teaspoon of juniper berries and a couple bay leaves ground in with the pepper, or maybe a little cayenne to give it some kick. No matter how you season your bacon, or whether or not you smoke it, knowing the key temps makes this a simple project and using a leave-in probe thermometer like the DOT® makes tracking those temps easy.
Key Principles of Making Bacon
Making your own bacon is as simple as getting the right cut of pork, curing it, rinsing it, and cooking it before slicing. If you have room in your refrigerator for a cookie sheet for a week, you can make bacon. Let’s look at the steps individually.
Find the right pork belly
Purchase a pork belly with the skin removed. It can be difficult to tell if the skin is on or removed, but an easy way to check is to make an indent on the fat side with your fingernail. If the skin is still on, your fingernail will only make a small indent. If the skin is removed properly, you will see a deep nail imprint in the fat of your pork belly.
Make the cure and cure the meat
Curing meat is a process of removing water and changing the proteins. We remove water by coating the pork belly in salt and sugar, which creates an osmotic pressure and draws the water out. By removing excess water from the meat, we lower its “water activity,†making it less hospitable to bacteria and other spoiling organisms.
For hundreds of years, people have used nitrates and nitrites to cure meats like bacon. The addition of these chemicals to the pork actually changes the nature of the proteins. The altered proteins retain their pink color when cooked and also acquire a different taste: think of the difference in flavor between a pork roast and a ham. Back in the day, cured sausages needed the nitrates to prevent botulism spores from forming. If people didn’t use it, they would get sick and die from bad salami or ham. In fact, botulism gets its name from the latin word for sausage! Now, you’re probably not hanging your bacon in the shed all winter, so the botulism-prevention aspect isn’t as important, but I do recommend using the curing salts for the full flavor and aesthetic effects.
If you’re not comfortable using the curing salts, however, you can omit them. The flavor won’t be quite the same, and the color of your final product will be more brownish, but it will still be very tasty.
More:
https://blog.thermoworks.com/pork/thermal-tips-make-applewood-smoked-bacon/
