Otto's Bacon

Reading through and trying some of Kenji’s recipes from The Food Lab, I wanted to make his All-Belly Porchetta (because everything else was awesome!). We don’t typically have pork belly in the house, so it became a grocery store request. The next time at the store, my wife asked the butcher for some, he didn’t have the size requested in the recipe (turns out that was a good thing), but she came away with ~4 lbs. of it. Despite not being big fans of the porchetta that came out of it, when she happened to see pork belly on sale at Costco (of course they were the 8+ lb. variety asked for in the porchetta recipe), she snapped up 3 of them (or was it 4?).

With an abundance of belly, I was now on the lookout for something great to make with it. Luckily pork belly is known far and wide as a superb ingredient for great meals. Of course, one of the first things that came to mind was bacon, though. Unlike porchetta or sticky pork belly dishes, bacon’s pretty cheap and easy to come by, possibly making it not such a great use of my bounty, despite it incorporating a couple of my favorite food prep methods: curing and smoking. After reading Meathead’s recipe at AmazingRibs.com (really just the title), I realized there might be some value in turning my pork belly at home into bacon (“It Is So Much Better Than Store Bought”).

Unexpectedly, finding Prague Powder #1 was not so easy, however. I figured I could just pop in to the local butcher shop (The Meating Place). It turns out, I don’t go there often and it was harder than I anticipated to get myself to go there. It’s not on any of my typical routes and I don’t drive much, anyway. Instead, I happened to find myself deep in Portland one day (the opposite way from my house from The Meating Place) and decided I had to stop by Otto’s to get some sausage and I figured I’d just pick up some curing salt there. Well, I guess it’s maybe not as common as I thought for butcher shops to carry curing salt because, when I asked, they said they could sell me a pre-made mix, but they didn’t sell the curing salt separate. I was told the process would involve a dry brine, explicitly discouraged in AmazingRib’s article, but I figured they knew what they were talking about, so I came home with a cup or so of curing mix (completely white, by the way, not pink at all) and followed the basic instructions given. It’s been a month or so now since that visit, but I vaguely recall being told to apply the mix liberally on all sides of the belly and let it cure for about 1 week.

What follows are the steps I followed. Probably some combination of the directions I was given at Otto’s mixed with Meathead’s process.

Ingredients

• ~2 lb. pork belly
• Curing mix from Otto’s

Process (started ~12/10/2019)

1. Liberally salt the belly, vacuum seal, and keep in the fridge for 7 days
2. Flip and massage the belly every day or so until it firms up (it felt pretty firm to me the first time I checked after a day or two)
3. Remove the skin (I should have done this before salting, but forgot), rinse, soak in fresh, cold water overnight
4. Smoke at 225°F until the meat reaches 150°F – I either used hickory or mesquite wood, I don’t recall which (I suspect mesquite, because I tend to overdo things)

Impressions

It sure tastes like bacon but it’s a little too salty. I’ll keep it around so I can compare it to the results of following Meathead’s recipe. My primary desired use for it is as lardons (since I can’t get that from the cheap grocery store bacon).

Changes for next time

Remove the skin before applying cure Change the soaking water one or more times to get more salt out Add some more flavorings (e.g., ground pepper) Not sure if this needs to happen when it’s curing or if it’s fine just before smoking (since none of the flavorings will really penetrate)