Tag: Food Preservation

A few years ago, my oldest came home from school saying that he and one of his friends were BFFs. I asked him if he knew what that meant. He said, “Yes, mom, Bacon Friends Forever!”

I tried so hard not to laugh. He was serious. And it got me thinking about how no matter the culture people have always bonded together over food.

Today I want to talk about curing meat. If you are a non-pork eater (whether for religious or personal reasons) please stay with me here, because the curing of bacon is the same process as curing other meats. For example, Pastrami is made with beef using the same method (even with a different seasoning recipe). And you can even make Bacon using Beef as a substitute (there’s a recipe for this at the very end of the post).

The process of curing meat use to be common knowledge for all families before refrigerators were invented. In fact there are still many cultures around the world that still cure meat in their traditional ways. If you are interested in learning other methods 2 Guys & A Cooler is one channel that I follow. And what surprises me is just how similar all these other meat preserving methods are to making bacon.

Curing meats, in short, is the process of removing water from meat to make it shelf stable without refrigeration. This is done by using high amounts of salt.

The reason why salt works in preserving meat is because salt draws water out of the meat and creates a saline environment that makes the meat inhospitable to the growth of colonies of bacteria and mold.

Specific salamis are cured for a specific flavor brought from the controlled growth of certain mold. So, in this instance salt is the controlling agent to that mold growth.

I mention this before starting to show you how easy it is to cure meat because there are certain diets where it can be tempting to alter meat curing recipes. You need to keep the high salt content on order to not grow bacteria or mold on your meat, and making it dangerous to eat. There are methods to alter the saltiness of the meat later on in the curing process. So give me a moment, and I will come full circle back to salt levels.

Let’s Make Bacon!

There’s many bacon recipes found all over the internet. My husband and I have tried at least half a dozen. And that doesn’t include the experiments we made in trying to make our own. None of them compare to the recipe made by Jess Pryles, which is our go to recipe. The easiest way of describing it is to think of your favorite grocery store brand and multiplying your love for it a hundred times. Or think of the best bacon you had in a restaurant, and this bacon turns out better than even the finest restaurant. That’s how much we love this recipe. So this is the one I’m going to share with you because it’s not too sweet, not too spicy, smokes without burning or sticking to your smoker/grill, and the level of saltiness is easy to manage for your preference–both at the beginning of the curing process and at the end.

The Recipe

Bacon From Jess Pryles

• 3 lb Skinless, Boneless Pork Belly
• 3 Tbsp Kosher salt
• 1/3 C White Sugar
• 2 Tbsp Pepper
• 2 tsp Paprika
• 1 tsp Pink Curing Salt (Prague Powder #1)

This recipe can be multiplied in direct relation to the weight of the pork belly you are working with. See “Managing Saltiness” to see how you want to treat this ingredient as well as the pink curing salt.

Managing Saltiness

Before I move on to the process I want to briefly walk you through your first option of managing the saltiness of your bacon–or any cured meat for that matter. You have two options of salt to use: fine grain salt or rock salt.

Fine grain salt is your table salt, kosher salt, or any other salt that has been milled down to a fine powder. Because of how small the salt has been broken down into, the salt easily penetrates deep into the muscle tissue of the meat. This will give you a punch in the face saltiness level that you can further modify at the end of the curing process.

Rock salt is the crystal salt that you usually see in the store for sea salt or Himalayan salt. There’s a couple of other salt options out there that uses the crystals or rocks to put in your own spice grinder or mill. Because the rocks are obviously larger than the salt grains, it takes it longer for the saltiness to enter into the meat tissue. This process speeds up as the water is extracted from the meat and “melts” the salt crystal/rock. If you prefer cooking on the less salt is more spectrum if cooking, this is the salt you want to use. (I’m in this spectrum, so I always use this salt for curing meat.)

One more thing I want to address, before moving on to the process, is the pink salt ingredient. If you are nitrite or nitrate sensitive, you definitely want to leave out this ingredient. Pink curing salt is included in many recipes because it is preserving agent. Depending on how quickly you move (or don’t move) through a pork belly depends on if this is a necessary ingredient for you.

Without the pink curing salt, your bacon can be kept in your fridge for a couple weeks before spoiling. So if you go through a lot of bacon, that the pink curing salt really isn’t necessary. But if it will take you months to eat through pounds (however big your pork belly is) you will need to think of an alternative long term storage option, such as bagging up the bacon in your family’s serving sizes and storing in the freezer.

As a comparison note, we cured whole bellies with the pink curing salt, and life happened. We were unable to cook with the bacon like we thought we would and it took us almost three months to finish that batch. It’s instances like this where families might choose to use a pink curing salt. But making bacon has happened long before the manufacture and sales of pink curing salt.

Curing Container

There are a couple of different options you can go with when it comes to what you will contain your bacon in while curing. You can choose to use zip lock bags, closed container, or open container.

The open container is easy because everyone has one. There are a handful of drawbacks though. First, you keep the curing bacon in your fridge, so an open container leaves your meat vulnerable to flavor exchange with other foods. The bacon is also vulnerable to other contaminates, such as someone sneezing while looking in the fridge. And the water extracted from the meat gums up in the bottom of the container through the curing process.

A closed container is by far better in regards that it prevents all the draw backs of the open container. Plus, if you are a family that eliminates or minimizes the amounts of plastics in your house, this fits in your lifestyle. But the drawback for the average home kitchen, is that you might not have a large enough reusable container for your meat to lie flat. I do have a Pyrex casserole dish (which has a lid) that’s the perfect size for a 5lb pork belly. However it comes out of meal cooking circulation for a week.

Both of these options are great for their own reasons. However it’s important to note that these two containing methods will require that you handle the curing meat by hand or other kitchen utensil such as thongs. So if you have any food handling aversions, this might be your determining factor.

The other option is using plastic zip lock bags. You will have to cut the meat down to fit in a one gallon size bag. Or you can leave it whole if you have 2.5 gallon bags. This option gives you an automatic barrier for when it’s time to flip the meat and contain all the extracted water. It is also the most space saving method in the fridge, if space is the limiting factor. The drawback to this option is the dreaded bag failure. If the seal is not secure, you will have the extracted water leaking in your fridge.

If you are using a 3 lb pork belly, the 1 Gallon Zip Lock Bag will be large enough. We generally use a 6-9lb belly and need the 2.5 Gallon Bag.

This bag method has been my method of choice with littles in the house. It just minimizes the other potential could-go-wrongs that happen in a very active house where the kids love to help and be part of the cooking process.

The pictures you see throughout this post are from the bag method and closed container, but we have done all three. They all work. But the open container method also dries out the meat, so it definitely does not come out as tender as the other two methods.

The Process

1. Measure out your seasoning ingredients (in direct relation to the weight of your pork) and set aside.
2. Remove your Pork Belly from it’s wrappings (whether direct from a butcher or from a wholesale meat provider) and rinse it off to remove any juices that it may have had in its packaging.
3. Season your meat with the seasoning ingredients, making sure that you have equal amounts on front and back, and all the ends. Be aware of all the creases in the meat and get the seasoning in there–the salt needs to be in here to make sure that all surface areas are covered in adequate salt. (If you are using the bag method, it’s easiest and cleanest to put the pork belly in the bag and season it in the bag. Seal up the bag once you’re finished.)
4. Close your bag/container and place the pork belly in the fridge.
5. For 7 whole days, flip the bacon over once in the morning and once in the evening.
6. Once the 7 days are up, can remove the cured bacon from the fridge or let it continue curing for a few additional days.
7. Remove the bacon from the bag/container and rinse off your pork belly. (See below for “Rinsing Advice”.)
8. Now you will low and slow cook or smoke the pork belly, depending on what equipment you have available at your home. If all you have is your oven, set your oven on the lowest possible setting and cook the pork belly until you reach the internal temperature of 165°F. (See Below for “Cooking Options” to hear about the other ways you can cook/smoke the bacon.)
9. Once you’ve reached the correct internal temperature, you will remove it from the heat source and put it on a plate/tray and cover it with foil and let the pork belly come to room temperature. (See “Tenting Options” below.)
10. The room temperature pork belly can now be put in the fridge overnight. (See “Cutting Options” below)
11. Slice the pork belly into the thickness of bacon you prefer, whether thick or thin.

You now have bacon!!!

Use this bacon just as you would with the bacon you’ve previously purchased from the butcher or local grocery store. If you are anything like my family, you will turn into a bacon snob and prefer the slices that you made over the store bought ones.

Rinsing Advice

This rinsing stage is going to look a little different for you depending on what type of salt that you chose to use.

As I mentioned above, my family likes the rock salt because we lean to the savory side of the food world, instead of the salty side. A generous rinsing off of the curing seasoning will leave a mild saltiness to it. A quicker rinse off is the maximum limit of our salt preference, but the starting off point for some of our family members.

If you choose to use a fine salt, a quick rinse is going to leave you with a salt bomb. (I did this once and that bacon was quickly reserved for soups and stews, and I don’t add any of the recipe’s called for salt. This bacon took care of the salt seasoning for the entire dish.) A generous rinse is what I consider a salt lover would prefer. But if you’re like our family of salt-less-is-more camp, but only have fine salt, I recommend filling a large bowl with clean water and letting the pork belly sit it for about a half hour or so. This is not going to undo the curing at all, but it will keep you from puckering from too-salty.

This is one ingredient that no one can tell you how to handle it, because everyone’s preferences are going to be all over the spectrum. So hopefully this section helps assists you in making salt choices that reflect your personal seasoning preference.

Cooking Options

We have cooked our pork bellies on our Traeger Grill and in a proper smoker. Both of these other cooking sources are great options, but our personal favorite is the smoker.

When it comes to grills, whether charcoal or propane, you want to use indirect heat. Even on the lowest setting/heat, it’s going to cook your bacon. This step should take no less than 3 hours. We are talking low and slow. And if you want to add that element of smoke flavor to your bacon, you can use a smoking chamber on your grill, like the one I have a link to below.

If you have a Traeger, or other grill that is a combo smoker, you want to keep your grill on the smoke setting and let the smoke cook your pork belly. It’s been a while since my husband smoked bacon on our Traeger, but he remembers it taking about 3-4 hours. Remember, this isn’t about time as much as it is about reaching that temperature of 165°F using just the heat from the smoke.

My husband loves the smoker that he found on a community “Free” page. This one allows you to customize your meat smoking experience better than a smoker/grill combo unit. His advice for using this cooking option is to soak your wood chips. At a bare minimum you soak them for 30 minutes, but 30-60 minutes is good. And in my ear, my husband is saying, “Do not soak grill pellets!” You definitely want the wood chips. And even with soaked chips, you still want to keep a tray of water in your smoker with your chips and meat. It keeps the humidity just right to keep the juices in your bacon.

The other advice that my husband popped in to give, is that if for whatever reason your pork belly just won’t come to temperature don’t worry. All you have to do is put it in your oven (lowest setting) and finish cooking it to 165°F.

Tenting Options

While this step can be omitted, you might consider to keeping it in your procedure. The tenting helps keep the steam in, instead of evaporating away while it cools down. My husband advocates that this is the secret that keeps his bacon from drying out.

If you want to tent your bacon but don’t want to use foil, you can use your lidded container (just don’t seal it).

Cutting Options

Here is where my husband and I have a slight difference of opinion. I have absolutely no problem slicing my bacon by hand. I’ve been slicing sandwich bread for over 3 years now, so I have a steady hand for this sort of thing. My husband prefers a meat slicer. Knife or machine, I’m an advocate for using what you have on hand.

We both do agree that letting the pork belly rest over night in the fridge is a huge step in your favor. If you slice your bacon at room temperature, you will more than likely find that it shifts on you and your blade slides out of place. By cooling the pork belly over night in the refrigerator, it firms the meat up and makes the slicing that much easier.

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Why is it important to cure the pork belly for 7 days?

Depending on who you talk to, or where you look up information, you’re going to find a wide spectrum of curing time as an answer. But before I answer this question I want to make sure we’re on the same page about why we cure meat, in this case bacon.

All throughout history meat has been cured to preserve meat in a time before refrigeration was invented. In fact, many countries today still depend on curing to preserve meat. The enemy of meat (and food in general) is exposure to water, light, and heat. These three things degrade food, promote bacterial growth, and increase the chances of food borne illnesses. Salt is an amazing ingredient, because it changes (in this case) meat in such a way that water is removed and it creates an environment that bacteria does not like or live in.

In fact, in another scenario, I have the perfect example. The yeast that I use to make my bread, when I neglect it, starts to grow bacteria. The whole yeast culture is thrown off and smells horrible. However, this is the culture of wild yeast starter. You have a community here. When the community gets out of balance you have to make changes to bring it back into balance and make the community happy again. Salt does this. I toss in 2 tsp of salt into my out of balance starter, give it a good stir, and by the next day all is right in the world of my wild yeast starter. What happened? The salt changed the environment of the starter. The bacteria became unhappy and quit reproducing. Mean while, the yeast became happy and began to populate again or recovered from its illness (or however you want to look at it.)

Now a pork belly is so much larger than my quart size mason jar of yeast starter. It’s a thriving metropolis in comparison. It takes much longer for salt to infiltrate that pork belly and withdraw the water content of the belly. It takes time for the meat to cure and stabilize itself to withstand the threats to food preservation.

I saw one site say that it takes up to 24 hours to cure bacon using their method. The difference is that they have to inject the salt in deep throughout the pork belly. This method is not using an injection method. It is the meat bringing in the salt, and the salt working its way into the center of the belly. This takes time.

There was another site that I saw claim that it only took 3 days to reach a “mild” cure. Food science being science, either it’s cured or it’s not cured. Cured meat is a process. It is a method. And the proof is behind the results on how the meat holds up over time. There’s nothing wrong with making salted pork. It doesn’t make it cured. It just means that it has a higher salt content that the meat that you pull out of your fridge or freezer. Please, let’s just call salted pork by its rightful name.

Can bacon be cured longer than 7 days? Absolutely! It’s not going to dry your pork belly out unless you’re using an open container. But that only happens because your fridge naturally evaporates water out of food that is left in there without being covered.

And let’s just be clear that evaporation or dehydration is not curing. Dehydration/evaporation is one method of preserving that is purely unique. Curing is an entirely different method of preservation, unique to itself. Every method has its own rules. Anything that doesn’t follow the rules is a different method for a different purpose.

I wanted to mention all of this because there were some friends of ours that we walked through the steps of how we cure our bacon. They stopped the curing step at three days and didn’t find the results that we said they should expect. There’s a couple of reasons why their first attempt of curing bacon didn’t turn out, so I can’t write definitively here what went wrong. I do know that we had shared from the same pork belly and the bacon had turned out with the above method. The two biggest suspicions I have is that not all the cuts and groves in the pork belly so the majority of the belly was working on becoming cured, but there were spots where bacteria had the opportunity to grow because the salt wasn’t there to make the meat an uninhabitable environment.

The other big potential of what went wrong is that the salt did not make it into the center of the meat. This is an important issue because remember, we are cooking low and slow. And since the center of meat is the last place to “cook”, this becomes a prime breeding ground for all sorts of potential food problems because salt wasn’t there to keep in check bad cultures. This then comes into realm of poor food handling.

I know that it’s tempting to take short cuts or speed things along quicker than described. We’ve all been there, especially when we’re excited to try a new skill and have great expectations. Please know that no matter how tempting it is, curing meats does take time. It can’t be rushed. And if you don’t believe me, you have to check out the link I have below for 2 Guys & A Cooler. They have amazing methods for making so many different cured meats that I can’t wait to get cracking to try. And what you see there just confirms what I’m saying that great meats take time.

Here are other recipes you may be interested in.

If you’re looking for a Beef Bacon (bypassing the pork all together), this is the recipe that I recommend. Disclosure, I have not tried this recipe yet. But this is the one that I have on hold for when I make that plunge.

If you’re interested in a Pastrami Recipe, this is the one that I have bookmarked.

2 Guys & A Cooler is definitely worth subscribing to if you’re looking at many other ways of curing meat. This link takes you to their video on making Biltong. I like their presentation because it all makes sense after making our own bacon for several years now.

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If a smoker is not in your budget, this might be the tool to meet your needs.