Okay, okay, I don’t necessarily know whether or not home cured bacon is any healthier than store bought bacon. But my intuition leads me to believe that on top of the fatty, salty goodness that they’re selling, there are a lot of preservatives and such. At least when you home cure bacon you know what you’re in for and know what you’ve put into it. The only preservatives we’re adding are salt and sugar and you get to control how much
I can say that DIY bacon is a bit cheaper. Not by a lot but maybe by about $1 a pound cheaper. For me, I’d rather make my own anyways so saving that extra $1/lb is just icing on the cake. I’d recommend buying your pork bellies at Costco. As far as I can tell they are really good quality, always in stock, huge, and reasonably priced.
We’re going to make what’s called ‘Equilibrium Cured Bacon’. This basically means we are going to use a calculator to figure out how much salt, sugar, and #1 curing salt we need to cure our pork belly. The alternative route is to absolutely douse your pork belly in these ingredients and wash them off at the end. While you will absolutely cure your pork belly and end up making bacon, it’s going to be too salty.
Figuring out the Equilibrium Cure Rub recipe is actually rather easy. The first step you’ll need to complete is to convert your pork belly’s weight into grams. This is pretty easy to do with a simple Google search.
Next, you’ll need to visit Local Food Hero’s website to use their equilibrium cure calculator: LINK HERE
Enter the weight of your pork belly in grams. Then choose the options ‘US’ & ‘Skin off’. Press calculate.
The top 3 results represent what you’ll end up making your cure rub out of. The ingredients are salt, sugar, and #1 curing salt. Using a cooking scale fill up a rub shaker with the amounts of these ingredients given. You will need to use this entire mix for your pork belly.
Some people love pepper bacon. How about maple bacon? You a hickory smoked bacon dude? How about juniper bacon?
My favorite part about making my own home cured bacon is the customization. Whether you like it sweet, spicy, or something else; you get to make it your own way. Adding different spices, rubs, herbs, sauces, etc. is a good way to accomplish this.
If you’re adding dry rubs, black pepper, herbs, seeds, or anything similar go ahead and coat your pork belly with whatever concoction directly after coating it with the cure rub. You’ll let it soak into the pork belly along side the cure rub for the entire 7 days, eventually rinsing it off with the cure rub.
Sometimes you want to get a little saucy and add maple syrup, ketchup, mustard, whisky, or whatever wet ingredient into the mix. Personally, I’d wait until about day 3 or 4 to add wet ingredients. Give the cure rub at least 3 days to do its job before you add extra liquid into the game. But get at it and make some crazy recipes! (Share your new found recipes in the comments BTW.)
Don’t take this customization aspect for granted as it’s a pretty powerful hack for this recipe. If you buy a big enough pork belly you can home cure 3 to 4 different bacon flavors from a single pork belly. Easy enough to accomplish by separating the pork belly in the beginning of the process.
If you want to make more than 1 flavor of bacon with your pork belly (you probably do), you’ll need to separate the pork belly into smaller chunks. Easy enough. But, just in case you’re wondering I’ll give you an example below using my pork belly that weighs 8.67lbs (3933g).
For Example:
Say my pork belly is 3,933g, and requires 86.5g of salt, 39.3g of sugar, and 12.6g of #1 curing salt to cure the entire slab. (This is what my pork belly actually weighs & needs.) If I cut my pork belly into 3 separate chunks weighing 1,000g, 1,250g, & 1,683g how much of each cure ingredient would each chunk need?
Well, the answer is slightly time consuming but rather simple. Plug all of the numbers into the cure calculator and record the needed cure rub ingredients for each slab. Now you have 3 separate slabs to test flavors on and the cure rub ingredients needed for each.
AuthorBradley BBQCategoryEntree, Meat, PorkDifficultyIntermediateThis home cured bacon recipe is surprisingly easy. Stop relying on the super market for over-priced and over-processed bacon, make your own!
Take the pork belly out of the packaging and pat it dry on all sides. Trim any areas of skin.
Calculate the Equilibrium Cure ratios using the calculator at this address: http://www.localfoodheroes.co.uk/calculator/dry_cure_bacon/
You will have to convert the weight of your pork belly into grams. Select 'US' and 'skin off' as your options.
Create your cure rub by combining the calculated amounts of kosher salt, brown sugar, and #1 curing salt. Rub all sides of the pork belly using all of the cure rub.
Place the pork belly into a plastic bag or tub in the refrigerator for 7 days. Flip the pork belly every 24 hours so both sides get a chance to sit in the cure residue.
After 7 days, remove the pork belly from the fridge and rinse all of the cure rub residue off using water.
Preheat your smoker to 180F using maple or apple wood. Smoke the pork belly until it reaches an internal temperature of 150F.
Remove the pork belly from the smoker and allow it to cool in the fridge. Once cooled down slice the pork belly into about 1/4" thick bacon slices.
Use a skillet or griddle to cook the bacon as you normally would. This bacon will stay good for about 4 weeks in the fridge or 6 months in the freezer.
Ingredients
Directions
Take the pork belly out of the packaging and pat it dry on all sides. Trim any areas of skin.
Calculate the Equilibrium Cure ratios using the calculator at this address: http://www.localfoodheroes.co.uk/calculator/dry_cure_bacon/
You will have to convert the weight of your pork belly into grams. Select 'US' and 'skin off' as your options.
Create your cure rub by combining the calculated amounts of kosher salt, brown sugar, and #1 curing salt. Rub all sides of the pork belly using all of the cure rub.
Place the pork belly into a plastic bag or tub in the refrigerator for 7 days. Flip the pork belly every 24 hours so both sides get a chance to sit in the cure residue.
After 7 days, remove the pork belly from the fridge and rinse all of the cure rub residue off using water.
Preheat your smoker to 180F using maple or apple wood. Smoke the pork belly until it reaches an internal temperature of 150F.
Remove the pork belly from the smoker and allow it to cool in the fridge. Once cooled down slice the pork belly into about 1/4" thick bacon slices.
Use a skillet or griddle to cook the bacon as you normally would. This bacon will stay good for about 4 weeks in the fridge or 6 months in the freezer.
Notes
Good question! I have quite a few up my sleeve that I’ll be sharing. But what I’d really like is for you to tell me what you’d like to see!
Got a hankering for grilled pizza? Let me know. A fantastic prime rib recipe you’d like me to share on your behalf? Let me know.
Leave a comment with your suggestions below or hit me up on my Contact Page.