Yes, you read that right: homemade bacon. It is easier than you think, and tastier than most store bought bacon on the first try. My fifth version is the best I’ve enjoyed to memory, so this is totally worth the effort! Let’s get to it- how do you make bacon at home? Some items you might not have on hand:
Kitchen scale up to eleven pounds
Curing salt, aka Prague Powder #1
Christmas at the farmhouse came in the form of meat and wine to finish 2018. While perusing the isles at Costco, they had an entire fridge filled to the brim with pork bellies. Pricing was $2.99 per pound, which is the going rate for our area. Pork belly in hand, let the over confidence begin! I immediately divided this into two pieces, and subdivided that again into three parts for slicing, one part for cubing. I missed one major step, you know, the most important one: curing. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and down the rabbit hole I went.
If you enjoy Korean BBQ, this might look familiar: cooked pork belly. Without curing, this meat cooks on the “edges” and the fat stays gelatinous even when it is finished. I order this occasionally, but this is not what I was going for. So what do you do with this mistake? I sliced and diced these, and added them to my baked bean recipe. The fat rendered amazingly, and I need to set some aside for future use.
I won’t even try to get into the science and technique of curing, but a few resources that helped me are:
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
Amazingribs.com How to Make Smoked Bacon at Home
You need to keep the belly intact for curing, which is a blend of curing salt (nitrite) that marinades for a few days. Then you smoke and slice 🙂
A high capacity and resolution scale is needed, and I ended up with this one. Being able to weight up to eleven pounds was never a need, but now I use this regularly. The standard recipe goes something like this (from Amazingribs.com):
3 pounds of unsliced pork belly about 1 1/2″ thick
4 1/2 teaspoons Morton’s kosher salt
4 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper
3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
1/2 cup dark maple syrup
3/4 cup distilled water
1/2 teaspoon Prague Powder #1
This scales up as needed, with the exception of curing salt. To calculate the correct amount for targeted parts per million of nitrites, you must see this calculator.
You will end up with something resembling this, either in a zip-lock or Food Saver bag. Make sure you have enough refrigerator space before you begin, a partial pork belly isn’t that small.
After a few days, you will have a wet cured piece of pork. Now it is time to smoke it for a few hours.
If it cured properly, you will end up with this delectably looking piece of meat that is begging to be sliced and cooked up.
The belly will cut nicely, but it can be a bit laborious slicing an eight pound plus piece of meat into as thin of slices as you can muster. My new twelve inch carving knife makes decent work here, even though it feels like it could use a sharpening.
Glamour shot.
The real deal getting prepped for vacuum sealing and freezing.
“Ok Eric, enough chit chat. How does it taste?” I can hear you already, so here it is: AMAZING. My new favorite cooking method is in our air fryer (which doesn’t fry at all, that’s another post) and it is ready in twelve minutes from the fridge.
*Edit* to add Eric’s new process with a 12 inch deli slicer!
Eric had been trolling the webs for nearly two years in search of a used commercial sized machine that could cut the bacon in one pass. One Sunday morning, he found a Globe 12″ slicer in town. Here it is at home, prior to deep cleaning/sanitizing and partial rebuild. It is well worn, but luckily Globe still stocks all of the parts.
This is looking to be an exciting day!
This is just what we were looking for. Consistent, thick cut bacon. We can cut 20 pounds of belly without breaking a sweat now.
Our maiden voyage with the slicer, 10 pounds of bacon ready to package.