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Making Bacon
24 October 2012, 22:11,
#1
Making Bacon
Cure your own bacon. It is much cheaper and much better than the rubbish you buy in the shops. I cure belly pork to make streaky. Buy a full belly, costs around £13-15 for several KG
(yes I will be using KG and G, its what the meat is sold in and what your scales weigh in). Try buying the amount of bacon you will end up with, it is going to cost you £50-80. The saltpetre
does help in curing and keeping the bacon for longer, but its main purpose is to give the bacon the pink colour you get in the shop, otherwise it is kind of a grey colour when cooked, which
might put off a skeptical member of the household.

You are going to need:

Sharp knives
Clean working area
Food grade rock / sea / corn salt (not table salt)
Brown sugar - what type is down to you, I use muscavado
Food grade storage tub
Space to put the tub for up to a week

These things are optional:

Saltpetre (yeah, the gunpowder ingredient, you can buy it on Amazon, at garden centers, lots of places, 0.5g/KG of meat)
Treacle
Molasses
Sage
Bay
Black pepper corns
any other herbs you fancy

OK, the ratio is 15% salt, 1.5% sugar as a basic cure mix. The % is of the piece of meat you wish to cure, so if you have 3kg of meat, you will need 450g of salt, 45g of sugar
and 1.5g of saltpetre. Do not go over this amount of saltpetre. The saltpetre needs to be mixed really well with the salt. The way I do it is to put the saltpetre in a food processor with
around 100g of salt and let it rip. I then mix the salt with the remainder of the salt and sugar. As for adding other ingredients, it is more of 'how much you want' rather than any
science. If you are using treacle or molasses, you can swap it with an equal amount of sugar. I like treacle as it gives a bit of colour on the bacon and maybe 20g of peppercorns
and a couple of bay leaves.

With the cure mix made, take your pork - I cut a full belly into 3 equal sized pieces and trim off any loose bits and cut out the ribs. Rub the mix into the meat really well, and put
in the box. Put it somewhere cold. Mine goes in the fridge. If you do not have space, a shed or out building is good in winter. You do not want it freezing but I would not much want to
go over 12c.

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Everyday, the liquid that has come off the pork it tipped away - you will be amazed by how much comes off. The meat is re-rubbed with remaining mixture - look to use maybe 30% of
your cure the first time you rub it in and then use the rest up over 4-5 days, so your meat is in the cure for 5 days in total. I have left it for 7 and it has still been OK. When the time in the
cure is up, take out the bacon and rinse and pat dry, You then need to hang it somewhere for a day for a pellicle to form. This is a skin that forms on the meat, it is just a protein / salt / water mix
that comes out of the meat. I make a hole in the meat with a sterile needle, put a thread through and hang in a large cardboard box in my hallway which is cool.

Once this is done, any that I am not eating soon gets wrapped in greaseproof paper then foil and put in the freezer. If I was storing meat over a winter without a freezer, I would wet cure it,
storing it in a brine until it is ready to be used. I have dry cured belly pork in the past using just salt and quite a bit of it and it lasted 2 years until it was used up, but I was just using that like pancetta.
It was stored hanging in my hallway wrapped in muslin.

I will write up how to brine cure meat soon.
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24 October 2012, 22:18,
#2
RE: Making Bacon
That's a really useful post. Thanks.
Find a resilient place and way to live, then sit back and watch a momentous period in history unfold.
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24 October 2012, 22:37,
#3
RE: Making Bacon
Really interesting post.

The vikings cured pork with curd, could eat raw. Not sure wich cut they used.
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24 October 2012, 22:46,
#4
RE: Making Bacon
I have ate the pancetta stuff I made raw, was good. You can eat any decent made bacon raw, its the modern shop crap that you are best off not eating.

Forgot to add in the post, I did have a small bacon slicer - it was OK and it did the job, but it was a pain in the arse to have have to take it to bits and wash it if I just fancied a bacon sandwich. I use a sharp knife to cut my bacon now, cut through the meat into the skin rather than through skin into meat, means I can control size and shape a lot better as cutting into the skin squashes the meat.
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25 October 2012, 10:20,
#5
RE: Making Bacon
Been making my own bacon for a few years now, it taste so much better and no white watery bits in the pan either.
Failure is NOT an option
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