About one month ago I went over to a friend’s house, and they walked me through the process of butchering a half-pig. I took both boys with me, and they didn’t seem to have any problems with the whole cutting-apart-an-animal thing, so that was definitely a good thing.
One of the fun things with having all these cuts of pork in the freezer is that we get to prepare them how we want to, and we get to experiment with flavors, seasoning, cooking method, etc. Our first experimentation was with the best, most important cut from a pig: bacon.
Sarah shared a good base bacon recipe with us, and suggested one riff on the recipe. Here’s what I did.
- 1lb 13oz piece of pork belly
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 tbsp blackstrap molasses
- 2 tbsp kosher salt
- 1 tsp curing salt
- 1 tsp fresh ground black pepper
Mix the brown sugar and molasses, then add the salts and pepper.
Spread the mix (rub?) on the slab, and rub it in.
Place the glorious piece of meat in a zip top bag, and place it flat in your fridge, flipping it once a day.
After seven days (or so) the meat will be firm to the touch. The bag will have accumulated liquid over the week; these are the juices from inside the meat.
Extract the cured bacon from the bag, and rinse it well with water. Discard everything but the bacon itself. Dry it completely when you are done.
This can be the end of the exercise. You may slice up your slab of bacon and fry it up. Or you can continue on and go one more step. For our first go around I decided to go all the way with it.
You can either roast it in the oven, smoke it on the grill, or both. For this one I choose to roast it in the oven. I brushed on some Stubb’s Hickory Liquid Smoke, put it on a rack, and roasted it at 200 degrees for 2 hours.
Roasting done, I cut off a couple of slices and fried it up.
I was surprised at how simple the process was. And the result was amazing! I’m looking forward to the other 13 pounds of pork belly we have in the freezer, and curious about what other flavors we could try.
Mmmmm. Bacon…