Bacon is finished -Pr0n

The weekend before last we butchered hogs and I saved several nice chunks of belly. My buddy caught wind that I was curing a fresh batch of bacon so he hit up the butcher shop and bought some belly for him. Last night we smoked it on my WSM over cherry. After the smoke we wrapped it and stuck it back in the fridge to cool off. After work today we sliced and vacuum sealed the whole works up.

My batch was seasoned with brown sugar and fresh cracked pepper, on my buddies we did brown sugar and then 1/2 with habenaro dust and 1/2 with brown sugar and Carribean pepper dust (both from my garden this summer).

Here are some shots from the last couple nights...






Cherry gave these slabs some awesome color











Yummy!




Shot of the sealer

Thanks guys! That new slicer made short work of processing things once the cure and smoke was over.

buttburner - these were indeed hot smoked, this was my 3rd attempt and best so far.


Spotted Cow for homemade bacon? We have a deal!


Ron - here is the recipe for the basic dry cure that I use:

1 pound/450 grams of pickling salt
8 ounces/225 grams of granulated sugar
2.4 ounces/68 grams of pink salt (Prague Powder #1)

Basically mix everything together, you want to make sure the ingredients are well distributed, I store mine in a mason jar in a dark corner of my cabinet. For these slabs of belly I use 1 tablespoon of cure per pound of meat. Once the cure is on I add my other seasonings/spices and place in a gallon zip lock bag. These were cured for 7 days (flipping each day) and on the evening of the 7th day we rinsed them off and stuck them back in the fridge overnight to rest and form the pellicle.

We had my WSM rolling between 190 and 200 degrees for a majority of the smoke, at the end I bumped it up to 225 to reach my target of 150 degrees internal temp on the belly. If it wasn't a week night I would have just let it rock at 200 until we got there. I think they were on the smoker close to 4 hours.

Hope that helps...if not give me a holler.


code3 - these bellies were outstanding, I almost wish I would have saved a little more than I did, the rest went to breakfast sausage and brats.