Making Bacon (in a non-euphemistic way)
A couple of weeks ago, I decided that making bacon was a skill that I should have. So, I talked to a friend that had made bacon and then did some quick online research. It seemed pretty straightforward, so I decided to dive in and just do it. I had a like-minded friend, so we did this together.
We purchased several pork bellies (also called pork side) of varying weights and I decided to attempt a one day cure (which is really just aggressive seasoning) on one piece and to go through the extended bacon-making process with the other. The one day cure did not work as desired, but we did end up with a tasty piece of grilled pork belly. With the other piece, I used about 1/4 c canning salt on each side of the pork and rubbed it in liberally, covering each surface. Within just a couple of hours, there was about 1/4 c of liquid in the bottom of the container. I put the whole thing in the refrigerator and for the next three days I added a liberal sprinkling of salt and rubbed it into each surface of the meat. For two of those three days, I also poured some maple syrup over the meat and rubbed it onto each surface after adding the salt (day one was the remainder of some B grade maple syrup and day two I had to switch to A grade).
On the fourth day, I took the bacon out, rinsed it, and patted it dry. The smoking technique that I was going to use is cold smoking, which involves removing the meat from the fire in some fashion. There are a number of designs, including a nice two-oil barrel design that has the fire in the bottom and the food to be smoked is in the top barrel. The smoke rises through two metal pipes that connect the barrels. I didn’t have that kind of budget or welding skill so I went with another design.
On Good Eats, Alton Brown covered bacon making (Scrap Iron Chef) and created a cold smoker using a series of three gym lockers. I wasn’t so fortunate as to have several lockers to use, so I decided to take the basic structure and instead of using two paper boxes (I’m weird about fire), I used a trash can, a hot plate, and a smoker box to create the smoke. The top of the trash can was covered with a flat box with a hole cut into it and a piece of flexible ducting attached to the hole. I chose not to compromise the structural integrity of the trash can lid so that I can use the can alone as a hot smoker. I used a cardboard box for the cold side. I merely placed the opening towards the front and cut a hole in the side for the other side of the ducting.
This is my original plan
The hot side of the smoker
The cold side of the smoker
The smoker in action
Clearly, I need to trim up the box over the hot side, but I wanted to get things moving and didn’t want to waste time messing about with it the first time. I smoked the bacon for six hours with a combination of apple wood and hickory smoke. There were a few issues:
- After the initial burn, I never got the buildup of smoke that I really needed/wanted.
- We used a CPU fan to draw smoke into the cold side, which just seemed to dissipate the smoke, not draw it, so we pulled it out and kept allowing physics to do its thing.
In general, the product was tasty. The maple was more prevalent as a smell and was in the aftertaste, which could be improved by using all B grade syrup. I sliced it pretty thin and served it alone and as a garnish with dinner. It was generally popular and I was pleased with the result. Next time, there will be improvements on the smoker, mostly in how the smoke is generated. I haven’t come up with anything as of yet, but will do so before I do this again.