I made bacon...

[ecowper]

NukeGuy a few hours makes little difference. I’ve had my bacon stay in the cure a couple days longer than needed to actually cure it with no ill effects. If you are concerned about it, you can soak the pork belly in plain water for a couple hours .... that will pull some of the salt back out. But, honestly, I wouldn’t worry about that too much.

The point of leaving the pork belly in the cure for a certain length of time is for it to get cured by the Prague Powder. If you look at the amount of regular salt in the cure, it’s not more than you would normally put on that amount of meat. The meat can only absorb X amount of salt.

[HorseDoctor]

I make a fair amount of bacon using a similar recipe (Rhulman’s). I routinely cure for a week but have stretched that almost two weeks without problem. I also always desalinate by soaking in fresh water for an hour after washing off the cure. You can’t overcure but you can get an incomplete cure so a little longer is better than too short. Try soaking for an hour. If you want saltier, do less next time. As long as you get it cured, the rest of the procedure is quite flexible. Relax. Have fun. Enjoy!

[EdF]

Me too!

[ecowper]

Yeah, I have yet to have my bacon cures be too salty. My kids want them to be saltier, actually.

[HorseDoctor]

I wouldn't mind a little saltier, but the "better half" is very sensitive to salt and I need to keep it pretty light for her. Hence the hour of desalinating. When doing bacon for others I do a half hour max.

[Skelly]

I know nothing about making bacon, so... do you basically just slice it and then fry it up the old fashioned way when ready to eat?

[HorseDoctor]

Many of the homemade recipes have a fair amount of sugar which can burn if fried too quickly. Fry it slowly at a low temp, or better yet cook it in the oven at 350 until desired doneness. Enjoy!

[Skelly]

Thanks HorseDoctor .. I've eaten smoked belly right off the smoker, but I'm from the south where we fry everything (especially bacon) and I figured that's more or less how it was done, but I knew what I'd eaten before off the smoker wasn't exactly the bacon of my childhood. I gotta try this.

[realdocBBQ]

Ok, the one time I made bacon, I loved the flavor, but was a little disappointed about a few things:


First, while the flavor was great, the texture was not what I wanted. It definitely came out more like ham. It would NOT get crispy in the frying pan (cast iron or regular non-stick). I believe I read in Meathead's article this was due to hot-smoking instead of cold-smoking, which he said he doesn't recommend. I need to go back and check again.

Secondly, the bacon I made was not very large in size width-wise due to a thin pork belly. I have looked around all the places where I can get this and have NEVER seen a pork belly that was more than like an inch or so (in the middle), once the skin was removed. Maybe to some this isn't a big deal, but it really was somewhat disappointing to have nicely-flavored but skinny and ham-textured bacon.

Am I all alone in this?

Has anyone tried cold smoking their bacon, and does it really come out crispy like bacon should?

[shify]

Texture is definitely more ham like than thin and crispy supermarket bacon. If you have ever had artisanal/high quality bacon it's not like supermarket bacon either. I get my pork belly at costco. They are 5-8lbs and same width as normal store bought bacon

[Black99vette]

Nice. I'll have to put that on the list. I thought it was much more work.

[EdF]

It's really easy, and worth it!

[Psinderson]

realdocBBQ, I definitely felt the bacon did not get as crispy but it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.

The belly I got was also too thin. It seems to be hard to get good belly around here.