I’ve now made bacon from scratch only 2 or 3 times and every time is a brand new adventure for me. I like to try different combinations of flavors but without a doubt the most popular ones are my Maple bacon, Chipotle Honey and Asian inspired bacon. Not super recently due to some major lifestyle changes but late last year. Here are some of the details that I took to create 9 lbs of homemade bacon from a simple pork belly.

I called up my buddy who owns a butcher shop in a small town not too far. Told him I needed pork belly and he made it happen. a few days later I| arrived and was greeted by a 9ish pound slab of pork just waiting to be turned into something deelish. It’s not pretty though. i mean, it looks like meat with a shit load of fat on and throughout it. Not to mention this piece of meat still had the skin on it so that meant I needed to learn how to carve the skin off, something I was strangely excited to do thanks to my new carving blade I had just picked up on sale for $350. This thing was the sharpest and most balanced blade I had ever touched.

Pork belly before carving the skin off. You can ask your butcher to do that for you.

Once that was all done, I portioned 3 (mostly equal) slabs of meat and I set out to make the rub/brine for 3 variations.

Asian:
The following measurements are per pound and more or less… slightly negotiable 

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons hoison sauce
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon soya sauce
1 generously sized piece of ginger grated(to make it easier simply freeze it first)
3 cloves of fresh garlic pressed
1 teaspoon of your favorite hot sauce (sriracha works too)
1/4 teaspoon all spice
1 crushed piece of star anise
2 tablespoons water

Honey Chipotle:

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper
1 tablespoon dark brown sugar
1/4 cup water (have seen recipes call for distilled water – I never used it and I don’t know why)
1 teaspoon of chipotle powder
2.5 tablespoons of honey

Maple:

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper
1 tablespoon dark brown sugar
1/4 cup water (have seen recipes call for distilled water – I never used it and I don’t know why)
1 teaspoon of chipotle powder
3 tablespoons of dark maple syrup (can sometimes be difficult to get – go to a local sugar bush at the beginning of a season and ask for it)

Mix all the ingredients in a large ziplock and place a slab o meat into the bag and do your best to remove the air from the bag and start massaging the meat. For the next 5-7 days, keep the meat in your fridge and flip it daily but not before massaging it nicely for a few minutes. Making bacon is not for the faint of heart or lazy but is worth the effort at the end of the day.

Now it’s game day. 7 days of dreaming, massaging and telling your friends all about it. remove the meat from the bags and give them a rinse off. some sites will tell you to really soak it but i found that took much of the flavor away so I casually rinsed it off in the sink and put back on a pan to dry for an hour or so. 

While the meat is drying off from it’s shower, this is a good time to get the smoker going. I have an actual smoker so I took my lump charcoal and got it fired up and then placed my drip pan underneath the the racks and filled it with ice water to keep it from getting direct heat from the charcoal because you want this to be a slow process. Get the smoker up to about 225 degrees and put the meat in. Now you can use any type of wood your little heart desires but I recommend using cherry and maple wood chunks (which should be soaked for a solid 20-30 minutes before putting into the smoker. Get the eat up to an internal temerature of about 170 degrees. Next stop, you want to cool it for a few hours in the fridge. The cooler the meat, the easier it is cut nicely.

Wrap it up nice and tight in saran wrap, freeze some of it or fry it up for breakfast over the next 7-10 days.

J