My foray into Bacon

[The Burn]

Decided to take a stab at doing homemade bacon with MH's technique and recipe. The only change I made was replacing the maple syrup with imitation maple syrup made with sugar alcohols and sucralose - so no carbs. I did use the brown sugar. I had purchased a 10 1/2 pound side bacon and split it in 4 parts. 3 got frozen and here's the 4th with the skin on:



I tried to do a clean, smooth job of removing the skin, but some of it was more of a hack job:




It did come off in one piece though:



The other side looked much nicer:



It cured for 11 days and looked like this when rinsed off:



Went on the Performer with Smokenator with Applewood. Had a little temp control issue, with weather going from drizzle to downpour to nothing while cooking, so I probably averaged 250 instead of 225 and it took barely over an hour to get to 150



Wasn't sure if the color was right since I've not paid attention to any unsliced bacon before. But the inside looked good and this tasted great fresh off the grill (and I assume will be good fried up too):

[Huskee]

Nice!! I have yet to try homemade bacon. I (gasp) am not a huge bacon fan (gasp again). But I really think the homemade would be better than any storebought.

Great post and nice pictures, thank you!

[The Burn]

I like bacon, but nowhere near the extent of some of our compadres here. Usually, if I have it more than a few times a month that's a lot. But as I was slicing it up tonight, I was thinking about how good this was going to be with eggs in the morning and on my burgers at lunch. Also cubed some up to make some lardon.

[The Burn]

It was really good fried up. Should have taken a photo, but will next time. As MH says in the directions, it won't totally crisp up like commercially produced bacon, but it makes a delicious medium cooked bacon. Yum!

[FLBuckeye]

Well done! The first day I made my bacon, I had bacon with eggs, a B.L.T. for lunch and a bacon cheeseburger for dinner...lol. Great pics

[W.A.]

Just bought 9lbs of pork belly. Has anyone tried the Asian bacon recipe yet? Thinking of doing both. I also plan to hang it in my PBC.

[The Burn]

I haven't tried the Asian recipe, but I'm thinking about it for the next batch.

Here's some bacon cooked up on my griddle that went on my cheeseburger - boy was this good

[David Parrish]

Wowzers TB!

[The Burn]

Thanks PB. The directions on AR make it easy to turn out quality food and I was just willing to roll the dice on the imitation maple syrup.

Heck, I realized this morning that I totally forgot a water pan during the cook. So now I have to do a batch with the fake syrup and a water pan, and then I've decide to do a batch with either real maple syrup or blackstrap molasses for comparison sake. Then there's the Asian version. Luckily, I've got 3 more packs left in the freezer