Making Bacon Sugar Free?

What recipe are you following?

In addition to adding some flavor to the pork belly, sugar can offset the bitterness of the salt carrier of the cure. I would think you could reduce or omit the sugar called for but this might mean a longer soak-out time. You don't want to change the amount of salt or pink salt the recipe requires. You could also add other seasonings, blavk pepper, garlic powder, fenugreek or others.

BTW if your recipe calls for Tenderquick, it has some sugar added. If you use a pink salt cure any sugar is called out as a separate ingredient.

EDIT - Let's say you went with a cure which contained 1% sugar, that would mean that 1 pound of bacon would receive 4.54 grams of sugar. A sugar molecule is too large to actually permeate the meat, only water and salts can do that, so sugar remains near-surface during the cure time and most of that will go away during rinsing and soaking.

thirdeye said:

... A sugar molecule is too large to actually permeate the meat, only water and salts can do that, so sugar remains near-surface during the cure time and most of that will go away during rinsing and soaking.

Click to expand...

This.

I have tried LEM's "Backwoods" packaged maple and pepper cures but none of the flavors have penetrated, so now I just use plain TenderQuick according to the box directions.

I asked a university meat science professor about this one time and he said that they only way to get those big molecule flavors into bacon was to inject.

airedale said:

This.

I have tried LEM's "Backwoods" packaged maple and pepper cures but none of the flavors have penetrated, so now I just use plain TenderQuick according to the box directions.

I asked a university meat science professor about this one time and he said that they only way to get those big molecule flavors into bacon was to inject.

Click to expand...

Some sugars on the surface can help with coloring during the hot smoking step on bacon, but I can confirm that on some of my Buckboarded pork loins I'll inject a 50:50 solution of water and maple syrup for some of my friends and they really like that flavor bump. I've never injected belly bacon.