Sunday, February 6, 2011

Bacon Day!

Wow, what a crazy week. I'd set the goal of writing 3 posts per week in this blog, but I failed miserably in that. I'll do my best to get back on track.

Anyway, blizzard schmizzard. Yesterday was the end of the curing process for my bacon. I pulled it out of the cure, rinsed it under some cool running water, wiped it dry and set it on a wire rack over a baking sheet then put in the refrigerator to dry overnight.

I woke up on Super Bowl Sunday and darn it if it's not snowing. Well Mother Nature, I don't care. There's bacon to smoke and you won't stop me.

First I took my pork belly out of the fridge to bring it up to room temperature.

Here's what it looked like after the cure.




I plunked a few chunks of apple wood into a bowl of water to soak. This process will help the wood to smolder and smoke rather than burn.

I shoveled a path through the freshly fallen snow in the back yard and made a small space on the snow covered patio for my smoker.

I set up the smoker, lit a small fire and waited for the temp to come up to 200 degrees. Once it did I put the belly onto the top grate, covered it up and now we wait.






It's going to take about 3 hours for the internal temperature of the belly to come up to 150 degrees. Now we wait.





OK 3 hours is up, the internal temp of the belly is right at 150 degrees and now we have BACON!

Behold its salty, smokey, sweet goodness!



And that's it. Sure it takes some time, but the steps aren't all that hard. Actually you don't even need a smoker. You can do this on just about any BBQ grill.


Now I have enough bacon to last me quite a while and it's so much better than anything you can buy in the store.

So get out there and start making your own bacon.






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