Makin’ Bacon

I smoked my first bacon this weekend. It was at my parents’ place outside the city.

Two Wednesdays ago I bought a giant slab of pork belly, smothered it in salt, sugar, and pink salt, and let it sit in a few ziplock bags. We drove up there, me in the passenger seat clutching my pork like an old lady grips her purse on the subway.

Already it was early afternoon, and I needed to get this thing on the fire. First to Wal-Mart for the chips then shoot down the curving country roads to the house.

A partially used weekend house isn’t like other homes you pass by on suburban roads. No one’s standing in the kitchen stirring tomato sauce dodging a pack of little kids. There’s no “mud room”: I learned what that was about a month ago. The garage isn’t full of toys and bikes. Life inside the weekend place doesn’t evolve. Neither the contents nor their placement have changed in decades. Books, magazines, photographs, light switches, television: everything is decades old, but tidy as the day it came.

Having hacked away at the rust-coated grill grates and shoveled out half a foot of ash, I started the pork and eased into the pool with our little kid. He loves to swim but started screaming inconsolably when we uncovered a frog caught in the skimmer.

Like the rest of us, he’s pure city, through and through.

Meanwhile, the bacon came out great: salty and smoky, dark and a tad sugary from the molasses.
(Note #1: If you don’t have a butcher, get the supermarket guy to remove the bones from a slab of spare ribs. However, supermarket spare ribs are skinned, so your bacon will lack that critical smoked pork skin. The first step, namely, drying it over a very gentle heat, is absolutely not my invention. I copied it from bbq expert on the web, who claims pork and other meats have to be fully dried before they can “accept” smoke. I assume he’s right, but I don’t even own a grill. I did rub the pork with a touch of nitrites, probably not necessary, as I’ve seen a bunch of recipes which don’t use them. I’m going to slice it up and freeze in batches.)

(Note #2: As amateurs, we wanted to confirm meat safety, hence the final low-oven roasting-it’s easier than dealing with more coals. I recommend this stage, but who knows. All I know is we made a mean bacon.)

Makin’ Bacon

2 ½ pounds pork belly, skin-on

½ cup kosher salt

¼ cup sugar

½ cup molasses

pinch nitrites (pink salt-optional)

1. Mix the spices in a bowl. Spread half on the bottom of a baking sheet and lay the belly on top. Spread the rest over the belly. Massage the cure all over the belly. It should really be worked into the meat. Cover and refrigerate. We sliced it in half so it fit in ziplock bags, which work well.
2. Cure the belly for about a week, flipping it every day. Ziplock bags make this easier.
3. When ready to smoke, soak several handfuls of wood chips (I used hickory) in a pan of water for 1 hour then drain. Meanwhile, remove the belly and rinse under running cold water. Dry well.
4. Heat about 12 coals and use a grill rake or some other utensil to divide the coals to opposite sides, leaving the center bare.
5. Lay the belly over the center of the grate skin up. Close the grill and roast for  ½ hour. Make sure the temperature doesn’t exceed 150. If so, remove a few coals.
6. After the ½ hour, add the same number of coals to the fire and divide a small handful of chips over each mound of coals, close and keep the temp at 150 or so. Do this every ½ hour. We did it for 2  ½ hours.

(See note #2 for this step.) Preheat oven to 150, lay the pork on a rack over a sheet pan and roast 2 hours. Remove, rest, slice, freeze, or whatever you like. We immediately roasted delicious, crispy lardons