Are You Achin' For Some Bacon?

Happy New Year! Did everyone have a wonderful holiday? I am back in Sydney after a much needed break with my family in Orange. I had a fantastic time checking out my Aunt's beautiful veggie patch (post to come about that), eating waaay too much Christmas food, playing with Harry the Labrador and cooking up a storm with my loved ones.

So, you are probably wondering about that big ol' pile of bacon up there. Well, I am here to tell you that I made it, I actually made bacon and it was so delicious (even if I do say so myself)! It was a process that took me about a week and it was incredibly easy as most of the magic happened during the curing process where I didn't have to lift a finger.
I had been wanting to tackle a project like this for a while now and when I was doing a little preserve jar shopping before Christmas saw this recipe on the Redback Trading Company's website. I won't be posting the recipe because I pretty much made this to the letter and the amount of ingredients and smoking time really depends on the size of your pork belly. The link to the recipe is below.  Here is how I made it:

First I paid a visit to my local butcher to buy my piece of pork belly. My butcher is a very friendly chap and was more than happy to share some of the secrets that butchers have when it comes to bacon making. Most butchers cure their bacon by submerging it in a brining solution made up of sodium nitrite, salt, water and whatever flavours and spices they want to use. The brining process takes a couple of days and then it is pumped with water to make it appear bigger before being smoked and hung. The process I used is what is known as dry curing. This requires a smaller amount of sodium nitrite (curing salt), salt, maple syrup and other flavourings. Depending on the size of your meat, it can take a minimum of seven days to cure before smoking. The butcher was so lovely, he boned the pork belly for me and he even gave me a bag of the curing salt which was perfect as I had forgotten to sort this very important ingredient out and had no idea where to get it at such short notice! He was a little sceptical about my dry curing method but I was optimistic and keen to press on with it. 

Unfortunately, I forgot to ask the butcher to remove the skin, hence my mad butchering skills in the photo above. 

The next step was to make up the paste which consisted of the curing salt, sea salt, maple syrup, onion powder, garlic powder and white pepper. The amount of cure depended on the weight of my pork belly which was about 800g after the skin was removed.

I then rubbed the paste all over my pork belly and popped it into a zip lock bag and then squirrelled it away in the fridge. Each day I would redistribute the paste over the belly and massage it in to make sure the the curing was even and the paste didn't go to waste.

Fast forward seven days and a 3.5 hour car drive to Orange where there was a barbecue, a smoking box, wood chips and a Dad to help me with it all. The night before smoking it, I washed off the curing paste and chilled the pork belly in the fridge overnight.

We used a mixture of hickory and apple wood chips which had been soaked for about half an hour in water. The smoke box is not really necessary; you can get the same results from putting the wood chips into a parcel of heavy duty aluminium foil and poking holes into it to release the smoke.

First I had to dry the belly at around 60C for an hour to dry the surface out. Then I turned the heat down further (the lowest it would go) and added the smoke box to smoke for around 4 hours (even though my pork belly was only small, I wanted it to have a very smoky flavour). I also placed the meat on a rack at the opposite end of the barbecue to where the heat source was. The smoke box was placed directly on to the burner and I only had one burner on. Then I turned the heat up again to around 60C for another one and a half hours until the bacon became a nice smoky red colour.
After the epic smoke-a-thon was complete, I cooled my bacon for a couple of hours and then put it in the fridge uncovered overnight.

Ta da! Bacon everyone! As you can see, I sliced it up somewhat thickly. The best way I could think of eating this was fried and added to a freshly laid egg from my aunt's chickens on a roll that was made by my Mum. The best egg and bacon roll I have ever had. True story.

So if your achin' for some bacon, get cracking as it is too easy! As mentioned, the recipe for this can be found right here.