Don't worry, it took me aaaages to find it all out!
Use belly, it has the best meat / fat ratio. Loin is drier, you need the fat running through the meat to moisten it. We get our butcher to cut all bellies up in fridge-sized portions, and we have a few flat plastic boxes with also fit between the shelves of our ordinary (domestic) fridge.
Weigh the meat, and if you're like me, write the weight down on a piece of paper
What you need:There's no need to buy special nitrites / nitrates, or (heavens forbid!) liquid smoke - yuck, yuck, yuck! You just need a lot of salt. Buy big packs if you can, just avoid the really cheap harsh tasting stuff. Fine salt is better than coarse as it penetrates the meat better. One day I'll get 'round to getting kosher salt, which is apparently best of all, but One Day hasn't quite arrived yet...
I'll tell you about amounts needed in a minute...
You also need a flat plastic box which will fit in your fridge or frost-free garage or a similar place. Never use metal tins or boxes.
How it works:The meat will be cured by the salt and. Once cured, the nasties will be out of the meat so it will last for ages.
It works by the salt drawing all the meat juices out and thereby drawing all the microbes etc out. You know it's cured when no more juices run out of the meat. Then you're left with meat with lots of salt in it, which will, of course, taste far too salty. Even our ancestors didn't eat it
that salty.
There are 2 ways to combat this salty taste, and both are used for each piece of meat:
- add sugar to the salt (again, amounts follow later) to take the harsh edge off
- soak the meat in cold fresh water for 1 hour, tip the water out and put fresh water in the box again and leave for another hour.
The latter sounds strange as you've just spent several days or even a week getting all the moisture content
out of the meat, so why bring it all back
in? Well, we know for sure that it works, and the way I look at it is that the salt pushed the
meat juices out (so inc bacteria, microbes or whatever you want to call the bits that will make meat go rotten), and that the soaking only brings
clean water in. Chemistry experts will be able to explain it (and probably prove me wrong
), but hey, we know it works.
What to do next: Well, once it's cured you can safely eat it, even in its raw state. It tastes nicer fried, though
If it still tastes too salty to your liking, you can blanch your slices or lardons for 30-45 seconds before frying. You could also not bother with the 1 or 2 hour soaking mentioned above, and always blanch each slice before frying, but I can't be bothered with that.
You will find that after a year of eating your own bacon, even the most expensive bacon you can buy in supermarkets will taste insipid. But by then you'll have pigs again to make your next lot from!
To smoke or not to smoke:You could also smoke the bacon once it's been cured with the salt, and the smoke particles will cure the meat for a second time, giving it a superbly long shelf life and great taste. Once the meat's been cured by the salt, leave it uncovered in the fridge for 2 days, it's supposed to start feeling slightly sticky and should 'take' the smoke better.
Either
hot smoke it (we use apple wood in a £60 smoker we bought from Amazon - no need to spend hundreds of pounds on a smoker!) until the temperature of the meat reaches... uuuh... 65F it was, I believe, which takes easily 3-4 hours. Make sure the temperature in the smoker doesn't go above about 90C (sorry about mixing up F and C, it's stuck in my memory like that - I can look up the exact measurements tonight).
Or
cold smoke it - for this it goes in the same smoker (or you can use a barbeque), and we have this little £25 cold smoker thingy-what'sit from Mark's BBQ's (I think, working from memory here) in which you put wood dust, light it using an ordinary tea light just so that the wood dust smokes, and leave it to do its thing for 10 hours. It works a treat! Otherwise you have to make a fire somewhere, then install a duct to cool the smoke and transfer it to wherever you've put the meat. Google for a few hours and you'll see some ingenious contraptions. I took the easy way out with that little cold smoker thingy (to use a professional term).
Whichever method you choose, have the fattiest side of the bacon upwards, so that when it melts a bit it moistens the meat underneath.
How much salt, sugar etc you need and what do you do with it:We tend to use 50g of salt per kilo of meat, which is quite a lot. You can then add anything from 10g to 30g of sugar, but personally I don't like it sweet (and I hate the taste of molasses). You can add lots of pepper, juniper berries, thyme... the list is endles depending on your taste. Google for ideas and then experiment until you find your favourite cure.
Some people use less salt, that's ok as long as the meat is fully cured (see below).
Rub the cure all over the meat, pushing it in every nook and crannie. Then put it in a plastic box, put the lid on and leave it in the fridge. Some people use ziplock bags instead of boxes.
Meat juices will start leaking out of the meat. We're not talking pints, here, just quite a few tablespoons or even a cup full, depending on quality and size of the meat.
Some say to leave the liquid in the box / bag, others say to tip it out. We tip it out as then it's easier to see how much liquid leaches out each day and to know when it's finished curing i.e. when no more moisture comes out. If the meat remains dry for a day, it's ready.
It will take at least 4 days, sometimes even a week. My own bacon a few days ago seemed to cure very quickly, so I covered it with salt again and yes, quite a bit of liquid started leaching out again for one more day so I must have put too little cure on it (hence why I said to write down the weight of the meat
). The cured meat should feel quite firm inside at its thickest point, not too squashy.
How to store it:If you have a chimney that's used, you can hang it in there. We just keep it in the fridge, as I would imagine most people do.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says to wrap the cured bacon in anything but plastic. I'm not sure about that, as we used to keep it wrapped in clingfilm and it always lasted really well. Then reading HFW's suggestion a few weeks ago I put the bacon in greaseproof paper, but it dried out. So we'll be going back to cling film. Mind you, it never lasts more than a few weeks in our house, anyway, that might make a difference!
Make sure everything you use and touch is scrupulously clean, and if you have clean / disposable rubber gloves then use those too (plus that saves you from getting salt from under your fingernails). Work in a cold place, too.
Oh dear, it's half past ten already,
I really need to get to work - I'll read this again tonight and might add a few things, gotta run now!