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.