Text 5846, 236 rader
Skriven 2008-04-22 15:18:42 av DAVE SACERDOTE (1:123/140)
Ärende: How To Make Bacon
=========================
This is cross-posted from my blog at
http://davescupboard.blogspot.com/2008/04/making-bacon-at-home.html

I encourage you to click through to it; I have lots of gorgeous
bacony photographs there.

==

For the past couple of years, I've been making bacon at home. I 
don't do it to save money; by the time I've bought the pork belly, 
seasonings, cure ingredients, fuel and chips for the smoker, and 
so on, I really haven't saved all that much. No, I do it because 
I love the different flavors I can achieve with different cures and 
because I like the results better. Commercially-made bacons are 
often injected with their cure - pumped up with moisture and extra 
sugars that make for a wetter, sloppier product. You've probably 
cooked bacon like that. It leaves puddles of salty white water or 
sticky residue in your frying pan, but before now you didn't really 
know why.

Making bacon at home is a time-consuming process, but not a very 
hard one. The steps are simple:

   1. Cure the bacon
   2. Dry the meat off so the smoke will "take"
   3. Smoke the bacon
   4. Chill the bacon so it's easier to slice
   5. Enjoy!

Starting the Cure

I'll give you three separate recipes - you can choose whichever 
one that works best for you, or you can do what I did for this 
article and make a batch of all three. You'll notice that all 
the recipes include an optional ingredient called Morton 
TenderQuick. This product, made by the Morton Salt Company, is salt 
combined with a very small amounts of sodium nitrite and sodium 
nitrate. If you are concerned about nitrites and nitrates in your 
diet, you may leave them out when you make your bacon, but remember 
that they not only inhibit the growth of harmful bacterias, but 
they preserve the wonderful pink color of the lean parts of the 
bacon. In the tiny amounts used in the recipes, I believe them to 
be harmless, but you can make your own decisions about this.

First, my "default cure." I make a "hot smoked" bacon which turns 
out a ready-to-fry but fully cooked product very similar to 
Russian Bacon. Because of this, I have had a lot of success 
with a brine cure:

1 gallon water
1 cup of Kosher or pickling salt
1 tsp Morton TenderQuick curing salt (optional)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar

Combine all the ingredients in a container and stir vigorously 
until the salts and sugar has dissolved. You can add other 
flavoring ingredients to the brine, if you like - bay leaves, 
mustard seed, thyme, sliced ginger, sage (pretty much anything 
that tastes good with pork and smoke) - to vary the flavor. 
Immerse the pork belly into the brine - making sure the pork 
is completely submerged - and refrigerate for five to seven 
days.


If you prefer a "dry rub" you can get excellent results with this 
honey cure. You'll need:

1 lb chunk of pork belly (or larger)
2 ounces honey
2 tablespoons (or more) coarsely ground black pepper
1 cup salt
1 tsp Morton TenderQuick (optional)

Pat the pork belly dry with paper towels, then rub it all over 
with the honey to form a thin but uniform coating on all sides. 
Next, roll the coated pork in the black pepper until all surfaces 
are covered with pepper. Finally, rub the entire surface well 
with salt to which the TenderQuick has been added. The pork 
belly should be covered with a nice thick layer of salt.


This is what the pork will look like when you have the cure 
properly packed around it. The pepper will be showing through 
the salt layer, and the honey will be seeping though a bit. If 
you have a vacuum sealer, put the bacon along with all the salt 
sticking to it (and whatever of the salt/honey/pepper mixture 
you can gather up with your hands from the cutting board) into 
a vacuum pouch and seal it tight. If you don't have a vacuum 
sealer, use a heavy-duty zipper-closing freezer bag. Try to 
press out as much of the air as possible from the bag as you 
seal it up. Refrigerate while curing for five to seven days.


Another dry-rub cure you can try is this "savory cure" using herbs 
for extra flavor:

1 teaspoon Morton TenderQuick
3 tablespoons Kosher salt
2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper
4 bay leaves, crumbled
1 tablespoon dried thyme

Mix all ingredients well and rub into the pork belly on all surfaces. 
Seal in a vacuum pouch or a heavy freezer bag and refrigerate while 
curing for five to seven days. This recipe will make enough cure to 
do a five-pound slab of bacon, so if you only have a small one-or 
two-pound piece, don't feel that you have to use up the whole batch.


Curing Time

For brine-cured bacon, just leave the container with the submerged 
pork alone in the refrigerator for about a week. Check every now and 
then to be sure the brine is reaching every part of the meat. If you 
have more than one piece of pork in the brine, turn them every day 
or so to make sure the same parts of the pork aren't pressed up 
against each other all the time (the surfaces that are pressed 
against each other don't get exposed to the brine as well.)


For dry-rub cured bacon, you will notice after a few hours that 
the rub has begun to draw moisture out of the pork and form a 
brine all its own in the bag. If you're using a loosely-fitting 
sealed zipper bag, you should turn it over twice a day to make 
sure all surfaces of the meat stay exposed to the salty brine 
evenly. As the days go by, more brine will form.

Brine will still form in a vacuum-sealed bag, but there's less 
room for it to move around. Once a day, take the sealed bag out 
of the refrigerator and gently massage the surfaces of the meat 
through the plastic. This helps ensure that the undissolved salt 
and other seasonings stay evenly distributed.

Finishing the Cure

After about a week has passed, the bacon is cured and should be 
ready to smoke. Remove the bacon from the cure and rinse it under 
cool running water. You'll only need a light rinse with brined 
bacon, but if you used a dry salt cure you'll need to lightly 
rub the bacon under the water stream to remove all the brine 
and undissolved salt and bits of herb, etc. Ground pepper 
might still stick to the meat. You can leave that on if you like.

Pat the bacon dry with paper towels and put it on a wire rack, 
rind (skin) side down, to dry for a few hours. Smoke doesn't 
adhere well to wet meat, so the pork needs to air until the 
surface feels kind of dry and even a little sticky. This sticky 
surface is called a "pellicle" and is formed when surface 
proteins on the meat dry out and harden a little. This extra 
step not only gives the bacon a better texture, but also 
improves the ability of the smoke to flavor the meat. Don't 
skip it.

Smoking

You may not have the same type or model smoker as I do, but you 
should be familiar enough with your own equipment that I don't 
have to tell you how to perform this step. Just remember to 
keep the bacon spaced out enough so that the smoke can flow 
freely around the meat and expose the entire surface to the smoke.

From top to bottom in my smoker:

Racks holding the bacon, placed rind (skin) side up

A pan of water. This provides humidity in the smoker and also 
catches and cools any fat that might drip from the bacon as 
it smokes. Just allowing the fat to fall into the coals will 
not only cause hot flares, but the burning fat will leave an 
unpleasant flavor and color in the bacon.

Under the water pan is a shallow tray filled with lava rocks. It 
is made of stainless steel and perforated with big half-inch-
diameter holes to let the flames from the burner through. It 
sits on a heavy steel rack holding it above the burner. When 
the lava rocks heat up, wood chips soaked in water are scattered 
upon them and smolder slowly, releasing their flavor.

Below the lava rocks, of course, is a bronze burner to provide 
heat.

I usually light the smoker about a half an hour before I'm ready 
to put in the meat. This gives the water and the lava rocks time 
to heat up. That way, I can load the meat in, throw on a handful 
of chips to start the smoke, and close the door.

Once the bacon is in the smoker and the smoke has started, keep 
the temperature inside the smoker at about 225 to 270 degrees F. 
The idea is to slowly cook the bacon without rendering out very 
much of the fat (a small amount will "sweat out" during the 
smoking process, but you will be surprised at how little it is!)

Keep an eye on the vents and when the smoke slows down, add more 
chips to keep a constant flow of smoke. You'll want to keep a 
small bucket of water handy with a handful or two of chips 
soaking so they are wet and ready when they need to be added 
to the lava rocks.

Smoke the bacon for about three hours. You'll know it's done when 
the skin has softened and pulled back from the edges of the meat 
and the bacon feels firm when pressed. The color should be a rich 
deep golden brown.

Remove the bacon from the smoker and place on a wire rack over 
some absorbent paper to cool. When the bacon is at room temperature, 
wrap it tightly in butcher's paper, plastic, or aluminum foil and
refrigerate until completely chilled. This will "set" the juices 
in the lean parts of the bacon and firm up the fat, making the 
bacon much easier to slice for frying.

Remember also that after smoking, the bacon is fully cooked. 
That means you can enjoy it like Russian bacon, thinly sliced 
cold without additional cooking. As Michael said: "Uncooked hot-
smoked bacon is one of the great decadences." I agree.

This moment is what makes it all worthwhile: Beautifully cured, 
perfectly smoked bacon, sliced and ready to fry or to just eat 
with some good black rye bread and sliced onion.

And don't forget about those rib bones that were on the belly as it
cured.  Just before slicing the bacon, run a sharp knife under the 
bones and remove them from the bacon slab.  Briefly fry, broil, or
barbecue them and serve them just the way they are.  Delicious, 
bacon-flavored spare ribs!  Don't think of them as a by-product, 
think of them as an extra-special bonus treat.


---
http://davescupboard.blogspot.com/ - Dave's Cupboard - Food and 
Restaurant Reviews; If I post it here in NCE, you'll find it 
blogged with photos at Dave's Cupboard.

http://bacon-labels.blogspot.com/ - A gallery of bacon package labels.
(The extra shelf in Dave's Cupboard.
 * Origin: Doc's Place BBS Fido Since 1991 docsplace.tzo.com (1:123/140)