How to Make Bacon

I got into curing and smoking meat to follow an obsession. Could I make some of my favorite foods from scratch? It turns out, not only can you, it’s not that difficult and if you’re patient and put the time in the end result is better then anything you can buy. This all started a decade ago now and the obsessions have only grown deeper and more intense. 5 years ago, I gave a talk about bacon at a conference and for a while was known as BACON GUY. Let’s get the record straight about something, I love bacon, but I’m not one of those people who wants to or needs to put bacon on everything. I actually disagree with the blanket statement that bacon makes everything better. In my mind, bacon has a place, and it can add smoke and umami to a lot of different recipes.

Having said that, here is a recipe for bacon. Personally, I’m more interested in sharing the interesting techniques and having you know and realize that they can be applied to a lot of other foods. They’re building blocks for pickling, charcuterie, and BBQ. Most importantly, this is a great introduction to what I like to think of as the art of patient food. It only takes a couple hours of active work, but more then a week from start to finish, and in the end you’re glad you waited.

I’ve read a lot of books about these subjects but there are a couple that I would say really taught me everything I know about this that I couldn’t learn from experience. Namely, Ruhlman, Charcuterie, Riechlen, The BBQ Bible, McGee, On Food and Cooking, and Katz, The Art of Fermentation. They all have a special place on my bookshelf.

Ingredients

1 5lb Pork Belly Slab

75g Kosher Salt
4g Pink Salt (Cure #1)
30g Brown Sugar
1 tbsp/8g Maple Syrup (or more to taste)
1 tbsp/6g Sriracha or other hot sauce (or more to taste)

Equipment

Digital Scale
1 2-Gallon Ziploc Bag
Charcoal Kettle Grill
Charcoal Chimney
Hardwood Charcoal
Wood Chips (The larger the better, I like Applewood and Hickory)
Tin foil
Sheet pan and cookie sheet/rack

Making bacon is roughly a two step process (each with a couple sub-steps). First, you dry-cure the bacon using salt and seasonings, then you smoke it. The combination of both dry cure and smoke is like a double whammy of flavor through preservation. You can buy or make bacon these days that is either not cured or not smoked, but really, you’re missing out. In the end of the day these are really effective methods for allowing the pork to keep for a very long period of time, though since you’ll be refrigerating, freezing, or eating this right away, the goal is for flavor, not shelf-life.

Part I: The Dry Cure

If the pork belly you have is straight from a pig, you’ll need to trim it into a uniform roughly rectangular shape, including removing any attached bones. Note: don’t throw any scraps out (I don’t). Freeze them and use them for stock.

Weigh all of the dry cure ingredients and combine them in a large bowl. Use a whisk to mix them together evenly, basically making a clumpy rub.

Lay the pork belly skin side down inside of a sheet pan and rub the cure all over, getting every inch of the thing well covered. Turn over and get the skin side, too. Caress the beast. There will be a lot of cure collecting in the sheet pan and thats OK. You don’t need it to stick to the pork (it will permeate like a marinade).

Load the belly into the large plastic bag, it should fit but have some room to spare. Shake any remaining cure and all the cure dropped in the sheet pan into the bag, remove as much air as possible and seal tightly. Put the belly flat on a shelf in your fridge and give it it’s space (ie don’t stack things on top of it and don’t stack it on top of things).

Now we wait.

Over the next 7–10 days, check the bag in the fridge at least every other day. By day 2, what was once a dry cure should now be a very wet cure and by Day 5, the belly should be surrounded by liquid. Every time you check on it, try to gently squeeze and move the cure around and return to the fridge rotated and flipped. Squeeze a corner between your thumb and forefinger and feel how much give there is. When you first put it in, it should feel soft and fatty like raw meat, but by day 7 it should feel very stiff, like -a well done- an overcooked steak.

Once it feels very stiff (at least 7 days), its time to come out. Put a clean rack in a clean sheet pan and make room for the rig in your fridge. Take the belly out of the bag, and rinse off completely in the sink. Place the cleaned belly on the rack and pat dry with paper towels. Put the whole thing, uncovered in the fridge overnight. This lets the belly dry a little bit and helps the smoke stick to it. Discard the bag and remaining cure.

Part II: Smoking

The goal is to hot smoke the bacon at around 200F. You want the internal temperature of the meat to get to 175F in about 2 to 3 hours. This would be pretty easy to do in a dedicated smoker, but chances are if you’re reading this, you’re like me and you don’t have one. What I do have is a 22" Weber Kettle grill and I’m not afraid to use it.

It’s really not that hard to turn a kettle grill into an effective hot smoker, you just have to learn how to set it up and put in a little more effort then normal grilling. You want to convert your grill into a convection oven that is also continuously full of wood smoke. You do this by making your charcoal bed into an indirect heat source (instead of cooking directly over it) and adding soaked wood chips to create steam and smoke.

First, take your wood chips and put them in a large bowl and cover with water. You’ll need about 5–6 cups total of wood chips. Put the bowl aside while you build the fire.

Open all the vents to the grill and remove the grate. Fill a large charcoal chimney with charcoal and light inside of the grill. When all the charcoal is fully white and ashed over (~15–30 mins depending on the size of the coals) take the chimney (with proper heat protection on your hands) and dump the coals all to a single side of the grill, ideally the side that’s facing the prevailing wind. If theres no breeze, thats fine, but if there is, rotate and move the charcoal so its like a hill ramping up to the side where the air is coming from. Put the grate back on the grill and cover while you prep the meat.

Take the meat out of the fridge. It should be very dry. Take a square of tinfoil large enough to wrap around the belly and make a small tray out of it. Carry this to the grill on a sheet pan. Place the bacon on the grill on the opposite side from the coals. Use the tinfoil to create a small barrier between the heat of the coals and the meat. The tin foil helps deflect the direct heat, but also makes it so that any fat that renders during the process surrounds the belly and makes it even more delicious.

Drain a handful of wood chips and throw them on the hot coals. Close the bottom and top vents half way making sure to rotate the grill cover so that the top vent is over the meat on the opposite side from the heat. This helps create the convection and draws the smoke over the meat.

Now we wait again.

Every 30 minutes, open the grill and check on it. It should be cooking slowly, not quickly, and removing the lid should produce a large cloud of smoke like you’re hotboxing a minivan. The outside of the meat should start to take on a much darker color but the large majority of the fat should remain attached and un-rendered. In fact, you want as little as possible to leave. While the lid is off, rotate the meat (flipping it after the first hour) and add another hand full of wood chips. If it looks like the charcoal is burning out, and a few more pieces before adding the woodchips. At the end of two hours, take the temperature of the meat. If its ~150F, you’re doing a really good job. If its a lot lower (130F), you need more heat, add more charcoal. If its already at temperature (175F), thats fine. Don’t add anymore charcoal and leave it for another 15 minutes before taking it off. At around 2.5 hours, you should be at the final temperature. Transfer the whole thing, including the tin foil to a clean baking sheet and let it cool to the point you can touch it, but it’s still warm.

If the belly was skin-on, now is a good time to make your life easier later and remove the entire skin. This makes slicing into strips much easier later on, and gives you a really nice smoked pork skin. (Don’t you dare throw that out! Cut it into large chunks and add to stock or to a spring pea soup like you would a ham hock). To remove the skin, bring a really sharp blade under one corner and slowly peal from one direction and continue to move the blade. The ideal is to remove the skin in one piece, leaving as much fat attached to the belly and not on the skin as possible. This should go pretty quickly and actually be pretty easy if its all still warm. Once it cools off it becomes hard to do again.

At this point, you have bacon. It is safe to eat and extremely tasty when directly off the smoker. Once it cools to room temperature, it’s up to you to decide how to store and use it. What I like to do is cut the whole thing into ~1/2 lb slabs (so ~5–8 slabs), pack each into individual vacuum bags and freeze them. This means you have awesome bacon whenever you want and it’s really easy to give to friends (they will greatly appreciate it, if they don’t, they’re not your friends). There a million ways to use your prize bacon. My personal favorite way is to cut it into batons and use in a simple pasta sauce or fried rice.

This was written and illustrated lovingly, from memory with borrowed colored pencils, by @aq