How to Cure & Smoke Bacon

• Produce

  • 3 Bay leaves

• Baking & Spices

  • 2 tbsp Black pepper, coarse
  • 25 Juniper berries
  • 3 1/4 cup Sea salt, coarse
  • 1 3/4 cup Sweetener

• Other

  • 1 Whole belly, cut into 3 sections (each of our belly slabs has averaged about 12 pounds, so that would be 4 pound sections
  • 2 t. saltpetre, optional (Check for saltpeter on Ebay or at an Italian specialty market

Found on reformationacres.com

Description

Ingredients

• 1 whole belly, cut into 3 sections (each of our belly slabs has averaged about 12 pounds, so that would be 4 pound sections)
• 3 ¼ cups coarse sea salt
• 2 teaspoons saltpetre, optional (Check for saltpeter on Ebay or at an Italian specialty market)
• a few bay leaves, finely crushed
• 25 juniper berries, lightly crushed (Buy Juniper Berries here)
• 1 ¾ c. sweetener, such as evaporated cane juice or brown sugar (Buy Cane Juice here.)
• 2 Tablespoons coarse black pepper

Directions

• Prepare the ingredients and mix them together in a bowl.
• Thoroughly rub the cure all over your belly sections, making sure to get every little bit covered with the salt & sugar mix. Reserve the additional cure.
• Stack the belly sections on a tray or in a meat tote, cover, and refrigerate.
• After a day the cure should have pulled moisture out of the meat. Pour it off and then re-rub the bacon with some of the additional cure as you did before.
• Re-stack the belly sections, rotating them. Cover and refrigerate again.
• Repeat this for another 4 or 5 days.
• Thoroughly (and I mean thoroughly) rinse the bacon and pat dry.
• Fry up a little test piece to make sure you have enough salt rinsed out. Remember that if you cut from a narrow end, it will be saltier than a thick middle piece.
• When it’s rinsed to your satisfaction, pat it dry.
• Lay out the bacon, singly this time in the refrigerator for a day to allow the exterior skin to prepare for smoking. This will make a slightly tacky skin to which the smoke will adhere better.
• We smoked our bacon using oak wood for the first hour or so and then switch to cherry. Apple would work really well if harvested from an untreated tree.
• Smoke the bacon at 200 degrees until it reaches an internal temperature of 155 degrees.
• Chill the smoked slabs prior to slicing to make it easier.
• Slice according to desired thickness.
• Cook the bacon in an oven preheated to 400 degrees for about 15 minutes depending on the thickness of the slices. (We find that homemade bacon retains more flavor during oven baking than in a skillet.)