bacon, bacon, bacon, bacon.

well, besides trying to sell all my crap in craigslist, i am also making bacon. not the proverbial bacon, that is neil's job, i just like to eat it. here i am with my pig belly....rubbing it down with maple syrup, black pepper, sugar, kosher and pink salts. I totally messed up the recipe and have about 10x what i need on here. oops. But, it looks cool. I got it down to the right quantitiy and seeled it up in a plastic bag in the fridge for a little more than a week for the curing process.

Then, I rinsed it off and let it dry out in the fridge for a couple days. Forming a tacky surface on the now cured meat is the most important step pre-smoking. I forgot to take any more pictures, which makes this a little boring, but then i smoked the sucker. I used about 7 coals on the webber and a couple hickory chips and a chunk of aged wet cherry tree. I smoked it out there for about 2 hours until the coals all burned away and brought it inside to the oven for the last hour at 200 degrees. I was searching for an internal temp of 150 and found it shortly before three hours were up.

Slicing it thick and frying it. MMMMMMM. this thing is salty. too salty in fact, but it is so good. I love it. the fat tastes amazing and when you slice it how you want, in thick strips or cubed or in lardons you can taste all the salty flavor, the smoke and the real pasture fed fat of great bacon. This was really easy to do, and I highly recommend it to everyone to try once.