How to Make Bacon: Dry Cured and Cold Smoked (Episode 23)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 มิ.ย. 2024
- Mass produced bacon has nothing on our cure and technique for making bacon. We use a dry cure and cold smoked process, which ensures maximum smokiness in the meat and superior flavor and texture.
Also included in this video: BG's thoughts on nitrite-free bacon, how to avoid botulism, and what's wrong with assuming health food stores only sell healthy food.
Warning: Making cold-smoked bacon requires careful attention to ingredients and the smoking process. This warning should not be discounted. Follow guidelines from the USDA:
United States Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service Meat Curing and Smoking Recommendations
www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/...
National Center for Home Food Preservation Guide and Literature Review Series: Smoking and Curing
nchfp.uga.edu/publications/nc...
Equipment for Making Bacon
Pork fresh side (a.k.a. pork belly)
A smoker that allows you to cold smoke
A meat slicer (recommended, but not necessary)
Mixing bowl and spoon
Medium and large aluminum pans
Pink salt (a.k.a. Prague Powder #1, not Himalayan salt)
Kosher salt
Organic dark brown sugar
Jellyroll pan and rack
Plastic wrap
Rubber gloves
A few chunks of apple wood
A vacuum sealer and Vac Master bags
Recipe for Bacon Cure Mixture (2.25% salt by weight)
(For 10 pounds)
14.51 grams of pink salt (a.k.a. Prague Powder # 1)
102.06 grams of Morton’s kosher salt
51.03 grams of organic dark brown sugar
Main Steps for Making Bacon
1. Prepare the cure mixture.
2. Use the digital scale to measure 16.76 grams of cure mixture for each one pound of meat.
3. Prepare a vacuum sealed bag.
4. Add the meat and cure mixture to the bag, close one end with your hand, and shake the meat and mixture to evenly coat the meat.
5. Seal the bag with a vacuum sealer.
6. Allow the cured meat to rest in the bags for 7 days for each inch of depth in the meat. Check the meat midweek to make sure there are no lumps of cure.
7. Remove the cured meat from the bags, pat the meat dry with paper towels, and allow the meat to dry overnight on wire racks in a jellyroll pan.
8. Smoke the meat in an electric smoker at 70-80 degrees for six rounds of 1 hour per round.
9. Par-freeze (slightly freeze) the slabs of bacon so they are easier to slice.
10. Slice the slab of bacon, weigh the meat and separate into stacks for packing.
11. Seal the into vacuum sealed bags.
Our Final Freezer keeps it about the food. We'll show you how to make simple, delicious, healthy (and often dairy-free and gluten-free) food -- always with a twist of humor.
We don't give you recipes. We show you how. - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
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This closely matches what I have come up with and method that works very well. Thanks for organized and accurate content! Awesome job.
Thank you! It's always nice to hear from others that our methods are stellar 😊
Best instructional video ever. Not trying to entertain or over explain to keep us watching longer. Thanks for respecting your viewers. On my way to Costco for a belly!
Thank you! Good luck on your endeavors!
Thanks so much, great episode!!!!
Thank you for watching!
Great content keep it up just found your channel!
Thanks Rusty, we put out a video once a month. Take a look at the rest of our charcuterie videos. The peameal bacon video has highlights for the upcoming months. Welcome to the channel!
That is Gorgeous looking Bacon ,I Love how the Cure #1 Gives it that beautiful Color
Homemade bacon is the best!
Impresionante explicación, sencilla y muy técnica. Te seguiré porque quiero hacer ese bacon.
Felicidades y sigue subiendo buenos videos.
Thank you!
Great content.
Thank you!
Thanks for the detailed explanation and for the erythorbate application rate. Love your bacon and jowl bacon episodes, dry cure is the way to go. Salt water loaded bacon from the store (e.g. Kraft Oscar Meyer) has too much salt and water and too little meat/bacon. Bacon was invented before refrigeration and bacon slabs were supposed to dry out to be safe. Also love your collaboration with Eric at 2 guys and a cooler. Excellent job, please keep up the good work.
We completely agree, the first time we had dry cured bacon, we never looked back 🙂. The BG reduced the normal application rate of the sodium erythorbate to not interfere with the instacure #1. Since it's also an accelerator, it can completely use up the nitrites if too much is used for a long dry cure application. It's normally used for fast cure brines, but in this case the BG is trying to fight off the nitrosamines. It's something that is not published in food science literature that much.
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This is good content.
Thanks!!
Tried this recipe it is amazing best bacon I’ve ever had
Thanks for coming back here and letting us know! It's so satisfying to know that others are enjoying what we've been enjoying for years.
I have been making bacon for a number of years here in the UK and I grew up with rind/skin on unsmoked bacon, you should give it a try. Just do the cure and leave out the smoking, then when you fry or bake in a hot oven wait until the rind goes crispy, this can be a little tricky as very hot rind will seem soft until it cools a little then it goes hard and crispy. Nothing better for taste and texture to have rind on, meat, fat, and crispy rind add a extra dimension :)
Thanks for adding this idea to the comments! We have heard of this before, but haven't tried it yet.
I love the idea of the rind on because it'll be like a cracklin/bacon combo
Very informative, I have been hot smoking my bacon and will be cutting some off my plank this week to try cold smoking with a smoke generator, although the ambient might mess with me. That was brilliant instruction on temperatures. HB BG.
Thanks! Glad it was helpful! Just make sure the slab is cured properly, just say no to botulism!
Been cooking for 1/2 century. Just getting into curing meats, I’ve done about everything else. Have cured 3 segments of a belly that I bought from Cosco. Using an equilibrium dry-cure mix, I cured 3 different flavored sections. I weighed the meat and used a dry-cure mix CALCULATOR and weighed the mix out in grams. Sealed each piece.
First piece: Juniper/morita pepper
Second piece: Coarse black pepper
Third piece: REAL maple syrup
After 5 days, the juniper one is firming up, with the most moisture in the bag. The black pepper one has second most moisture but really isn’t firming up. The maple is almost no moisture, and little firming or color change.
Bought a PH tester ($250.00) and am going to check each piece to be sure that PH is below 6, before cold smoking. After smoking, will wrap in cheesecloth and hang. I’m in Tennessee and the weather forecast is favorable for this. Lows in the low ‘40’s, and the highest HIGH will be 58 degrees. I have done a lot of research and I think that I should lose about 1/4 to 1/3 of the weight through curing. Does all this sound RIGHT?
Just to clarify, were you using our cure recipe or a different calculator?
The meat doesn't lose much mass when it's dry-curing--maybe only a couple percentage points.
I have hot smoked bacon but would love to get into cold smoking bacon. My questions are when I hot smoked the bacon I let it sit in a tub of water after the 7 days of curing over night before I smoked it to get as much of the salty ness out as I could. With this recipe is that necessary? Also you say you add an extra gram or two of cure mixture to your bags as you load them. Could you also add an extra gram or so of prauge powder to the overall cure mixture? I guess in short can you add to much prouge powder?? I loved the video I’m just nervous and want to make sure I have all my basses covered before I dive into the cold smoking world!
Great question Matt!
You don't need to let the bellies soak overnight with this recipe. Since the cure is measured for each piece, you only need to rinse off the cure and pat dry. If you soaked the bellies, they wouldn't be salty enough for the finished product.
I would not add an extra gram of Prague powder because the recipe is already at the USDA limit for sodium nitrite.
Happy birthday😀👍
Thank you!
Can fold Bacon like a U then can make long slices on small slicer. Also have you tried a pellet maze smoke generator for cold smoking
Excellent idea Rusty about the bacon taco! I thought about a pellet smoker, but I process about 100 pounds of bacon at time and that cedar closet that sits on my smoker can handle the whole load at one time.
New subscriber here!
Glad to have you! 😃
Does this recipe come out with sweet tasting bacon because of the sugar?
I'm looking for a salty/savory/non-sweet bacon so I am curious about your recipe.
Thanks
Dan
That's a good question given the amount of sugar in the recipe, but no, it is not sweet at all. The salt completely offsets the sugar in the recipe.
What about adding coarse Black Pepper? Would you add that to the brine or coat the bacon before smoking?
I would add it to the brine. You can add whatever you want after you've weighed out the proper amount of cure mixture. This could be black pepper, maple syrup, chili flake, and much more.
You have a few thing that are a bit off in your explanation of the use of Nitrite in curing! First if you only use the amount necessary to cure a particular piece of meat, then there is very little of any Nitrite remaining in the finished product! As the Nitrite is consumed in the curing process! Next you DO NOT want to use Sodium Erythorbate in a dry cure as it will cause the Nitrite to break down before complete penetration of the meat is achieved!!!! If you are injecting the meat then Yes using Sodium Erythorbate will speed the cure to as little as a day or two! But using it in a dry cure breaks down the Nitrite in 2 to 3 days and complete penetration and curing is not guaranteed to happen! By mixing a big batch of cure you may not get even amounts of the Nitrite in each bag! It is better to leave the Nitrite out and weigh it for each bag separately based on the meat weight and multiplied by 0.0025 for that piece of meat! That is the only way you will be sure that you are not getting to much or to little Nitrite for a particular piece of meat! As to the formation of Nitrosamines! You have to literally BURN the meat to produce any significant amounts of Nitrosamines! If you cook bacon at a low temp you can still get it crispy with out issue as the temperature that Nitrosopyrrolidine the second most common volatile Nitrosamine is created is at temperatures above 338F, so low and slow is the key!!! All of that being said the average person gets HUNDRIDES of times more Nitrosomines from other sources that no one EVER talks about than you will ever get from PROPERLY cured meat products! For that it is vitally necessary to measure the Nitrite for EACH piece of meat separately and not mix the nitrite into a big batch of cure where exact amounts of Nitrite are impossible to control!
Thanks for the comment Mike. The BG appreciates your concerns but here are some of the reasons why we do this method. We're not using enough sodium erythorbate to use up the sodium nitrite. 1 gram per 10 pounds of meat is is less than 1/3 the recommended amount for use as an accelerator. Large batches of cure makes doing this much easier at scale, that's we mix the holy heck out of the cure mixture. It's very consistent in nitrites per unit weight, and using larger chunks of meat allows the law of large numbers to smooth out any inconsistencies in the cure. We bake our bacon which ensures a lower nitrosamine production if the oven is set at 350F. Cooking bacon in a fry pan in much more difficult to keep the burner/pan temperature low enough to keep nitrosamines from forming. It would be great to see you make the same kind of video describing how to make bacon, the charcuterie community needs more content!
@@OurFinalFreezer As long as you cure using the bare minimum of Nitrite you are not going to have an issue! If you have Nitrite present with the Amines from Proteins, Nitrosamines are going to be produced no mater what temperature you cook at! In fact if you swallow the Nitrite (made in your mouth by your own saliva) with Protein, your stomach acid breaking down the Protein releasing Amines produces Nitrosamines! So cure correctly using the minimum amounts of Nitrates and you will be fine!
I have to agree with mixing the cure for each slab separately. It's the only way to know you have the proper amount of cure#1 for each slab. Why take the chance? Like Mike mentioned above, mix everything but the nitrite and measure it for each slab.
Watching your hand get closer and closer to the blade ... (18:57) ... please STOP!! I guess the most important ingredient to making delicious bacon is fearlessness and confidence :) Overall, great video and miss the bacon so much!
BG says that his overconfidence with slicing meat this closely comes from his experience as a cabinetmaker on the table saw. I still think it's reckless. Pretty sure I'm right.
Nope it is not side seat slicing as you can not see what the person actually doing the slicing sees!
I am searching for Alton brown show video link on the issue... anyone?
hi where do you get the pork belly?
I would ask your local butcher
How about some volumes rather than mass. Like 1/4 cup of salt per 5 lbs?
Unfortunately, different salts have different densities. So a 1/4 cup of Morton's kosher salt has a different mass than a 1/4 cup of Diamond Crystal. Measuring by mass is really necessary for this process.
I’m a bacon stealer too.
Excellent 🙌
Bacon stealing , I'm in.😁
pink salt is that the old way. prob not needed =)
Please make maple bacon next time🙏
Added to the Excellent Ideas Basket ✅
Use the hand guard on the slicer for the love of God.
What the heck does 911 have to do with having your bacon sliced??
New regulations from the department of Homeland Security prohibit meats cured at home to come into contact with meat slicing equipment for commercial purposes, to mitigate attempts to carry out bioterrorist attacks. 🤷♀️
Gotta square that meat off!
Nothing worse than elliptical meat