If you have never tried to make your own bacon, you should do that immediately. An 8 lb slab of pork belly, some curing/kosher salts and your choice of spices gets you something that looks like this.
Curing the Pork Belly
Leave it in your fridge for a week, make sure you use some pink salt in addition to your regular salt, otherwise you’ll get some nasty bacteria and it will make you sick/kill you. Remove from fridge and wash off your spices, then throw it on your cold smoker for 4-5 hours or until it gets to about 150 degrees internal. It will look something like this.
Fully Smoked Bacon
You will never go back to packaged bacon ever again.
Details (It’s sort of an inexact science for me):
-3Tbs Kosher Salt
-3Tbs Cracked Pepper
-Curing Salts as needed based on weight
-3 Bay Leaves Crushed
-Honey/Bourbon Depending on your taste, 2-3 Tbs of your choice.
Keep in mind you can substitute the pepper and bay leaves for honey and brown sugar if you want a really hearty “maple” bacon flavor.
[…] Nathan “Doctor Bacon” Taylor waxes eloquently about his recent foray into pork belly preparation. […]