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Good morning and welcome to my weekly newsletter!
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This morning, it’s all about making bacon.
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I buy pork belly from a restaurant supply chain up here (US Chef). It comes in a very large slab, ten-twelve pounds, for $3.29 per pound. I’m kind of picky about the slab that I choose, trying to get a pork belly that has close to a 1:1 ratio of fat to meat.
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When I get home, I slice the large slab in half so I’m only cooking about five pounds at a time.
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One of the pieces of equipment that I feel is essential when it comes to curing meats is my vacu-sealer. I love this thing and it makes this process so much easier.
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The half that I’m not going to cook right away goes into a bag and vacu-sealed, then into the freezer until I’m ready for it.
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The other half also goes into a vacu-bag. Then I add the curing salts—about one teaspoon per five pounds of meat—as well as all the other spices and some water. This time I used fennel seeds, coriander seeds, black pepper, cinnamon, maple syrup, cloves, and some other spices I’m not remembering. Probably a bunch of the prime rib rub mixture that I regularly mix together.
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You need to make sure that you add enough water so that it dissolves the spice mixture. I once didn’t add enough and the spices became a paste and just stuck to one side of the meat so it was unevenly spiced while curing.
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After you add the spices and water, just seal the end of the bag with the vacu-sealer. You still want some air in the bag, just no new air.
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There are other ways to cure meats. However, with any cure, there’s always the concern of botulism. By keeping the curing meat in an air-tight container, I’ve eliminated that worry.
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Now that the bag’s prepared, I stick it in my fridge for seven days. I make sure to pick the bag up, slosh the cure around, then turn the meat over, once a day.
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Here’s a picture of the meat in the bag with water and spices. This is the end of the seven day process.
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Before I took the meat out of the bag, I took a picture of the end of it. See how nicely marbled it is? It has that 1:1 ratio of meat to fat. This is going to make excellent bacon.
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Open the bag and drain out the liquid. At this point, it’s up to you how you want to proceed. You can wash all the spices off the meat, partially wash off the spices, or leave all the spices on, encrusting the meat. For this batch, I washed about half the spices off.
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In addition, some people now let the meat rest in the fridge for up to twenty-four hours to build up a tacky surface on the outside, letting something called a pellicle form. For me personally, I find this works better with Canadian bacon (made from pork loin) than regular bacon. It doesn’t really add anything to the flavor or texture for pork belly.
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I smoke the bacon at 180° until the internal temperature of the meat reaches 150-155°. This will take between six-eight hours. The amount of time is variable due to the thickness of the meat and how cold it is outside.
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Here’s a picture of the meat on the grill, just after I put it on. You can see the smoke tube already going on the left side. The smoke tube has been a huge game changer for me. I get so much better smoke flavor using it. Note the color of the meat prior to smoking.
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I’ve cooked enough meats that I can generally tell the temperature of a piece just by touching the meat. However, with something like this, I really want an external probe to tell me what the temp is, to make sure that I’m hitting it correctly.
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Here’s a picture of the bacon fully smoked. It actually looks more red than this orange color that shows in the picture.
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At this point, I’ll let the bacon rest on the countertop for an hour. To do that, I’ll stick the meat on a cutting board and cover it with aluminum foil. The reason to rest your meat is because when you cook meat, the muscles tense up and the juices end up being squeezed out. When you properly rest meat, with something covering it, the meat relaxes and reabsorbs some of that moisture. (There’s actually science behind this, measuring how the weight of a piece of meat goes up as it reacquires moisture.)
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I’ll take the aluminum foil off after about an hour, let the meat reach room temperature, then stick it in the fridge for a day.
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The other piece of equipment that we have that’s utterly marvelous is a meat slicer. This lets me have evenly sliced pieces of bacon. However, it slices cold meat MUCH better than warm meat, so we always cool cooked meat completely before trying to slice it.
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In order for the slab of bacon to fit onto the meat slicer, we generally have to cut it in half, so the strips of bacon we get are short. We’ll wrap four of those short slices up in plastic wrap and freeze them, pulling out one package every week for Sunday breakfast.
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So that’s my process for making bacon! Yeah, it has a few steps in it. However, the end product is worth it. Absolutely delicious and not full of chemicals. And while I’m spending time, I’m not spending that much money per pound.
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Let me know if you’re interested in the prime rib rub seasoning that I create. That’s a whole other thing and this newsletter is already long enough.
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Los Angeles. The city that never sleeps.
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These stories take inspiration from those hard-boiled detectives of yore, with broken noses and steely eyes. The white knight you could rely on because the rest of the world had soured like a rotten apple. Even if he (or she) didn’t follow the rules.
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Or maybe because they broke them in order to see justice done.
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Come see what the MCM Syndicate has to say about these types of “heroes” as we enter our seventh year of publication.
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MCM – So Criminal, It’s Good.
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Horray! It's May! And there's a new book on sale only on the KRP store.
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This month? Night Strike--a historic aviation thriller written by Blaze Ward--is on sale for just $0.99. It's in part to celebrate the release of the fifth book in the series, Sea Wolves.
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The Red Branch—a top secret Soviet operation to hunt Nazis following WWII.
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In South America, they discover a conspiracy to attack New York City.
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Do they save their enemy?
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The Red Branch, a new military aviation action-thriller series, set in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War (what westerners call the Second World War), when heroes must rise up, regardless of their politics, to save the world.
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