Home cured bacon
This was an interesting one… much easier than I thought it would be.
I used Michael Ruhlman’s recipe from here. You just take a pork belly, rub it with a dry cure mix (mostly salt and sugar), and leave it in the fridge for 7 days. You need a little nitrite salt in the mix to prevent botulism, which I got from here.
Then you rinse the cure off, and cook it in a very low oven until the internal temperature is high enough to kill any bugs. The cure and drying reduces the weight a fair amount, I ended up with about a kilo of bacon from a 2.2kg piece of pork belly. Once it’s cool you can remove the skin and slice it as thick or thin as you like.
It’s bacon! But it’s a bit… different. It’s far ‘meatier’ tasting than other bacon that I’ve had, and goes much crispier than the bacon you tend to get in Australia – it reminded me more of the bacon I had travelling in Canada. I think it’s something to do with the dry-cure method (vs a wet cure method that Australian butchers use), but that’s only a guess with no factual basis.
It’s way more bacon than I would every buy, but bacon freezes really well, so I just sliced it up and layered between sheets of baking paper in freezer bags.
Posted in Meat and tagged garlic, juniper berries, pepper, pork belly, salt, sodium nitrite, sugar, thyme with no comments »
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