Smoking Bacon on my PBC

[AZRedneck]

Your question has been more than answered above. All I would add is don't get hung up to much on 225 as a pit temp. It's a relative number, and in a perfect world would work for almost everything. But, if it was a perfect world, it would be pretty boring, and we wouldn't need a cool place like AmazingRibs.com.

[kill2grill]

In advance I want to say I am not up on my bacon knowledge so if this offends - go eat some bacon and try and forget. Why brine it at all vs. grabbing some pork belly, crosshatch the fat side a bit, put a rub on it, and smoke it with hickory/etc.

It came out like bacon on crack....so that just makes me wonder why brine the darn thing?

Here is the pre-cook shot:



and what I sliced up for fantastical bacon goodness.

[EdF]

The brining is usually for a bunch of days to cure the belly into bacon. Looks like what you've done here is like Chinese char siu - an equally fine way to make a pork belly. Try making it with 5 spice rub some time. I've also seen an Italian variation that I think is called porcetta

[hogdog6]

By all appearances it doesn't matter what it's called That just looks "AMAZING" (pun intended) 😛

[MadChemist]

I smoke bacon all the time on the PBC...turns out great! Only bummer now is my local Costco decided to stop carrying pork bellies!

[JTK]

I have done a few of batches of bacon in the PBC. A couple of times I used foil to plug up the holes to get the temp between 225-250 and the other times I did my normal start up and hung the slabs without worrying about that target temp. All of the batches came out amazing and you'd be hard pressed to find a difference. As long as the meat hits its target temp, the only difference will be the amount of time you want to wait for it to be done.

Where I do see a difference in flavor is the curing time, I've cured batches for one week and let others go for two....in the future I will definitely let it cure for 2 weeks if you can, the extra week is worth it.

[Spinaker]

I've smoked bacon on mine quite a bit. It works just fine. I think 225 F is too low. 275 F is about perfect for me. Which is where the PBC likes to hang out.

[jmott7]

I've done it. No problems.

[LuckyPorker]

I did this batch of bacon at around 220 last week.