# Made some bacon.



## willfish4food (Jul 14, 2009)

I was in Costco the other day and noticed they had whole pork bellies. I've always wanted to try my hand at making bacon so I scooped one up... I should have gotten two. It turned out pretty good. It was a little salty for my taste when eaten plain, but it is awesome with potatoes.
























Here's what I did (sorry, I should have taken pictures of the process, but forgot):
I cut the 10+ pound slab into thirds - 3ish pound slabs each at the points where the thickness changed. I wanted to have three slabs each with a pretty uniform thickness. I took the middle slab and dried it with paper towels and set it aside while mixing the rub.

The rub was pretty simple. 1 cup dark brown sugar, 1 cup kosher salt, pepper and garlic till it looked good, and 2 tsp Insta-Cure #1 pink salt. Mixed it all really well and portioned out a third of it for the first slab. The recipe I was loosely following called for me to coat the belly in maple syrup before rubbing it down. I didn't have maple syrup so I meant to double the sugar, but forgot. That might have contributed to the saltiness of this batch.

I put the slab in the largest cake pan we have and thoroughly rubbed it down in the mixture. Then I slid it into a vacuum bag, pushed most of the air out and sealed it without vacuuming it. I put it in the fridge on a flat surface for the next 7 days flipping it every day. This was probably the hardest part of the process. I found that every day I wanted to pull it out and get it smoking.

Finally, after the 7 days I pulled it out, rinsed it off then sliced a piece off and fried it up to check the saltiness. It was pretty salty so I soaked it in water for about an hour and checked it again. It was still a little salty but impatience got the best of me and I took it out to smoke. I bought a smoke tube on Amazon that can be used for cold smoking. It worked perfectly. I cold smoked the bacon for 4 hours then brought it in for testing.

As it happened, we had some store bought bacon in the fridge so I fried up some of both. The home made was heads and shoulders above the store bought. To be fair though, the stuff from the store was whatever was on sale and probably not the best on the shelf.

The bottom edge of the slab was almost all fat so after slicing each piece, I cut off the part that was mostly fat. These were what was left, and one of the only pictures I have of the process.



I ate about a half pound of bacon the first day. Then I vacuum packaged the rest in three 8-oz bags of sliced bacon, two 4-oz bags of cubed bacon, and one 14-oz bag of bacon fat that I will render down when my current stash of grease runs out.

I think I'll pull another slab out of the freezer tonight and once it thaws, I'm going to start the process again. Hopefully, I can get over the excitement this time and remember to take some pictures.


----------



## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

Great job on the bacon and nice thread. 

Keep us posted.

.


----------



## Springville Shooter (Oct 15, 2010)

Great big bacon steaks.....yum!------SS


----------

