cured some bacon

We butchered pigs a week ago, and I got 16 pounds of pork bellies and using a recipe an old timer gave me, I brine cured the bellies into bacon. Cold smoked it this past weekend. Looks great and tastes great. My problem is that the bacon is not very hard like some I have seen for sale down south. Down in VA they had hard cured ham and a hard cured bacon that were quite tasty. I am not sure how they got that nice hard finish to the bacon.

Most likely, the others were dry cured rather than brined.

Salt cured...

Zim smoke it some more to get more fluid out of it, you have the taste but there is still plenty water in it that needs to come out to harden from being dry, also give it a good coat of pepper to keep mold n such to a minumum if you can't tend the smoke all day long. The smokeiness won't get to taste much more then it does but it will form a crust so to speak that will harden n dry some after a spell, old timers I know left bacons in the smoke house for over a month at times smokeing when they could until it fit their likes, --just a thought

Here it is

Fantastic!

LD :thumbsup:

I have been buying uncured bacon at the store lately. The wife asked me what the difference was and I told her that they just cut the pig up before it got well.

the 'hard bacon' you mention is hung to dry after a cureing mixture rubdown then cold smoked maybe 4-7 days. good stuff. my grandma made white gravy from the fry-pan drippings.

I would agree with the above that you need to keep them in the smoker longer at real low temp's.

I do quite a bit of smoking and I dry cure my bellies in the fridge for over a week, using Cure #1 and misc. spices. Then I put them in my smoker, where I cold smoke them (theoretically it should be at temps of 70-90 but in AZ I can't get any lower than around 100; but that's okay) for around 14 hours. I use an AMNPS pellet smoke generator to create the smoke, which just smokes and doesn't raise the temp's too much; better than trying to keep low temps while burning smoke-wood.
:v

This is a follow-up on my post above with a picture of the bacon I made using my technique above. You can ignore the bowl of burnt ends from some pulled pork.

Deano, amigo, I will take those nasty burnt ends off your hands. No, no, don't thank me. It would be perfect in a posole!

:rotf:


Wow that's good looking bacon!

Gee whiz that looks good!

What time is breakfast at your house, I promise I won't be late.

As a kid in a vary un woodsy family in Denver, I always wanted to buy "a side of bacon, a poke of salt,& some Daniel Webster cigars" and ride my horse from Denver to Pine Bluffs WY.

Yea, I was 9 or 10 so no horse to ride, no $ to spend, and I don't think I could a made the trip and still be in by bed time. :rotf: But the slab bacon sure takes me back

Were you able to get a cigar at least? lol

ff

Rev_William said:

Were you able to get a cigar at least? lol

Click to expand...

lucky strikes from 20+ year old Army Rations (k rations I think), until the guy selling them got wise & started pulling the smokes out of them before he handed the rations to us kids

Man those smokes crackled and spit when you lit them after all that time, talk about harsh :barf: no wonder I never took the habit up :grin: