Making Bacon

I borrowed a book Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, from Lauren. She brought it over the day we made sausage. It's available at Kitchen Window here in town for those who want it or presumably all over the internet for the rest of you.

I became obsessed with all the amazingly lovely sounding sausages and things in the book. So I read it cover to cover and decided to start trying things in order. Lauren was right with me on this plan.

So we started making bacon a couple weeks ago. First I ordered some Pink Salt (aka nitrates) off the internet. Then I set, my minion, Kate to finding a local source for pork bellies, which apparently the meat people call side pork. After calling everywhere she found Finer Meats on Nicollet when asked if they had side pork the reply came "Of course, we're Finer Meats!" Other great attributes of Finer Meats for pork belly includes no minimum purchase and ready availability and a great reputation as a good meat place in Minneapolis. They got us a 10lb slab in about three days. We were all excited but put the curing off a couple days so that it wouldn't need to come out of the cure and be smoked when I was unavailable. In this time we learned that the downstairs fridge at Lauren's place is broken. Sad, lost, 10lbs of side pork.

Finer Meats came through again, just a few days later, I always call and check, but mostly they say they have it or will have it in a day or two. This time it was 9.8lbs with the skin on. Lauren cut the meat into thirds while I went and found an old earring to use in the photographs just to twit a friend of a friend in California. That's why our pork belly has a nipple ring. It was taken off immediately after photography completed and is not actually involved in making bacon.

We then used the basic cure as listed in the the book to cure 1/3 of the belly. We made a sweet cure insprired by their sweet cure using maple syrup and some other spices (which we noted but I don't have the notes right now). And a savory cure with different spices and pepper. All three sections were packed into food saver bags and left to cure. They have now been down for five of the seven to possibly 10 days they need to fully cure. They are firming up nicely. This is apparently part of the process and what the salt/nitrates do to them. We hope to pull them on Friday and smoke them then.

The folks at Finer Meats seemed pretty excited when Lauren talked to them and said they would slice the bacon for us on their big meat slicer if we brought it back in! So I suspect we'll try slicing on our own and possibly use them if it turns out to be really challenging. Complete pictures are available here.

bacon!

Well I'm back from bacon. I think everyone had a good time. I did despite the fact the toilet in my sleeping room didn't really work. The hotel was full and there was nowhere they could move us. It was great to mix up my friends from their diverse corners and introduce them. I don't know why it still amazes me that friends of mine from different circles like each other but it does.

Programming seemed to be really popular. I was totally and completely disorganized with the knife sharpening and maybe it needed a longer time slot. The axman field trip however was great, and so was shoe bling and pachinko.

My weekend has to be classed on the whole as completely and totally amazing, enlightening even. Just fantastic, if sleep deprived.