# Buffalo Bacon



## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

About a year ago Bears Butt turned me onto to his Venison Bacon. He posted a how-to thread here: http://utahwildlife.net/forum/26-recipes/58578-venison-bacon.html and he gave me a couple packages of the stuff to try out. Man, it was really good.

Venison bacon's been around for a long time and there's a bajillion ways to prepare it. I finally got around to making some using ground buffalo and pork scraps. Bears Butt made his from scratch. I took another route and made mine from a spice kit from PS Seasoning.

Ingredients:
16 lb - ground buffalo burger 
8 lb - pork scraps
1 pkg - PS Seasoning's Venison Bacon Cure http://www.psseasoning.com/collections/cures/products/venison-bacon-cure
3 - cups ice water
6tbsp - liquid smoke

Directions:
Keep meat frosty thru the entire grinding process. 
Here's the frosty ground buffalo burger just before it was broken down and mixed with the cure: 


Grind pork scraps 3/16". Place ground pork in a garbage sack and chill in the freezer.

In a large tub mix the ground pork with ground buffalo. Keep the meat frosty. Mix cure with 3 cups of water and 6 tbsp of liquid smoke. Distribute cure mixture evenly to ground meat and then mix well. Keep meat frosty. To keep the meat cool I mix with a paddle, not with my hands. Grind meat again, 3/16":


Pack meat tightly into greased 11"x16"x2" cake pans. 3 pans will hold 25 lbs of ground 

Cover and refrigerate overnight; 8 to 12 hours.

Remove the bacon from the refrigerator. "Massage" the ground bacon again to remove any air pockets. Pushing on the bacon with an empty cake pan works well.

As a precautionary measure cover the bottom of the oven with aluminum foil. Bake, uncovered, at 175° for 3 hours. Check internal temperature (this batch was 135°) Remove from oven and drain. Flip bacon upside down on newspapers and pat dry.

Lay the slabs of bacon on oven racks covered with newspapers. Bake, uncovered, until internal temp is 140° -142° (about 1 hour more). If cooked higher than 142° the bacon will be dry:


Remove bacon from oven, pat dry and cool in a freezer or refrigerator:

Divide into serving size pieces. Slice and then refrigerate. Freeze after 2 weeks:

Bacon must be fried to eat:


Comments:
The ground buffalo burger in this batch had about 8% beef fat in it.

Tried to make the bacon with two layers, one fatty or light-colored, and one layer lean or dark-colored burger. It wasn't worth the trouble. After cooking the color was pretty much the same throughout. The only advantage was it added a little "curl" to the bacon on the fatty side when fried.

It's important that the meat is kept frosty throughout the grinding and packing process. Of equal importance is using a large enough tub to have plenty of elbow room to properly mix the cure with the ground meat.


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## High Desert Elk (Aug 21, 2012)

I suppose you can follow this recipe with any kind of meat?


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

High Desert Elk said:


> I suppose you can follow this recipe with any kind of meat?


Yes. Bears Butt used Mule Deer. Ground bacon recipes have been out there for Whitetail Deer for quite some time.

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## GaryFish (Sep 7, 2007)

Cool stuff Goob. And no guts involved. Well played. Looking forward to seeing how things turn out in a couple of weeks.


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

GaryFish said:


> Cool stuff Goob. And no guts involved. Well played. Looking forward to seeing how things turn out in a couple of weeks.


Yeah, thanks. OK for my first attempt at burger bacon. I usually don't have that many air pockets with ground meat in a pan though.

The two layer thing didn't work. But so far so good on the flavor; it tastes as good as the other two times I ate venison bacon. Fries up quickly; not too dry, leaves some grease in the pan. The whitetail deer bacon burger I had was dry, didn't have enough pork fat in it.

I will make it again. Next time a 12 lb batch will be plenty.

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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

Put freshly ground black pepper on about one-third of the bacon packages:


Yeah, a 12 lb batch would have been plenty. I don't know what I'm going to do with all this:


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## High Desert Elk (Aug 21, 2012)

"I don't know what I'm going to do with all this:"

May I PM you my mailing address???:grin:


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

high desert elk said:


> "i don't know what i'm going to do with all this:"
> 
> may i pm you my mailing address???:grin:


ok

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## longbow (Mar 31, 2009)

Dang, Goob beat me to it. I have a good friend that often posts recipes and nifty Goob-type stuff on our Alaska Forum. After a couple phone calls to answer some questions, he decided to post his bacon process.

Since I have a ton of blacktail venison that visiting hunters left here from last season I ordered my stuff from: 
http://www.friscospices.com/p-337-hickory-bacon-cure.aspx

I was going to post a pictorial of my first try but Goob pulled off an awesome job of showing how to do it. I'm glad you posted a link to the place you got your spices. FriscoSpices charged me 1 arm and 1/2 of my good leg for shipping.

Good job WyoGoob!


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## longbow (Mar 31, 2009)

Did I get top-of-the-page?


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## longbow (Mar 31, 2009)

Dang, I wanted to beat Goob to at least one thing.


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

Chuck,

Back when I had a life a good friend and I would go to Soldotna and hang out at our friend's place on the Kenai and fish. We would drive to Anchorage and buy sausage making and vacuum packing goodies, gifts, for our host (and vacuum bags for ourselves ). We went to a sausage and meat cutting supply house that seem to have everything. I even found a #32 5/16" grinding plate there; only place I ever seen them. Check them out, may save you a bunch on wait time and shipping cost:

Alaska Butcher Equipment and Supply
4507 Mountain View Drive
Anchorage, AK 99508
877-478-8877
907-258-7502

I didn't do the "working the meat until it gets sticky" method. My bacon worked out pretty good though. The 3/16" thick sliced bacon will bend quite a bit before it breaks and it sliced cleanly in the electric slicer. I suppose if you wanted ground bacon that you could wrap around a duck's breast you would have to work it, knead it, massage it, until it's a sticky goo like the instructions call out. Bears Butt did the sticky goo method and I didn't think his bacon was any more flexible than mine. I had more annoying air pockets than he did though.

The wild game ground bacon is OK. Mine reminds me of turkey bacon; pretty lean. It's another way to make something different out of wild game meat. When I make it again I'm going to add more pork fat; try to get the amount of fat closer to 30%. Also, I might try partially cooking it in an oven, dumping it out of the pans and then finishing it off in the smoker.

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## longbow (Mar 31, 2009)

Good tips Goob. I'm going to look up their website. FriscoSpices stuff still hasn't got here.


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

So the bison bacon was processed at 135°. It should be refrigerated for storage and then fully cooked to serve. It's been a week now since I made this stuff and a couple packages have been out on the porch, 27° to 55°, the entire time. The bacon color may be slightly lighter now and there are no disagreeable odors.

Microwaved some for 2 minutes on "high" and it came out pretty good. It made some juice; grease and water. The smokey bacon flavor was consistent throughout, no sour, off-color, or spots without any cure. It even sounded like bacon cooking. 

The bacon passed my flexibility test, not bad for as lean as it is:


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

Buffalo BLT


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

*bison bacon pasta salad*

Made a pasta salad with some ground bison bacon.

*Ingredients:*
1/2 lb - bison bacon, fried in bacon grease
2/3 cup - halved black olives
2/3 cup - halved red cherry tomatoes
2/3 cup - quartered yellow cherry tomatoes
1/2 cup - halved green ripe olives
1 cup - sliced onions
2 tbsp - chopped fresh parsley
1 tbsp - chopped fresh basil
1 tbsp - chopped fresh oregano
16 oz pkg - pasta
1 cup - Italian dressing
3 or 4 tbsp - bacon grease
salt and pepper to taste

*Instructions:*
> Fry ground meat bacon in some "real" bacon grease. Set on paper towels to drain and cool. Cut bacon into bite-sized pieces.
> Add a tbsp of bacon grease and some salt to a pot of water. Bring to a boil and add pasta. Cook el dente, boiling for 7 to 8 minutes.
> Drain pasta and transfer to a large mixing bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.





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## elkmule123 (Aug 14, 2013)

Looks good!


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

Bacon weaving is the latest craze. It's kinda neat really. One can weave a flat to whatever size suits your fancy. 
Here's some buffalo bacon woven into bread-sized squares. 


Weave the bacon on a paper towel, cover with food wrap and microwave it for 1 minute. The food wrap shrinks tight on the plate pressing the bacon weave flat as it cools.


The weaves can be placed on a cookie sheet and cooked in an oven if you prefer.

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## Bow hunter mojo (Oct 12, 2013)

This looks like something I will have to try out. Thanks for sharing. It looks delicious!


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## GaryFish (Sep 7, 2007)

2nd darndest thing I've ever seen.


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## wyogoob (Sep 7, 2007)

more woven bacon:




A 12oz package of bacon cut in half will make 5 weaves the size of a slice of bread.

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