Don't worry, we've been there, too, I know how you feel! Despite all the instructions we'd had when we started, we still had to learn to
see when the meat was ready.
I had always read about "making your own bacon", and the newspapers & books & websites all claimed it would be oh-so-fantastic, so I was really disappointed that mine was so salty, and chewy. I felt a bit betrayed by those writers.
I then googled "bacon too salty", only to find that more people have bacon that's too salty the first time around, than that there are people whose bacon is perfect straight away!
Being used to bland shop-bought bacon probably has a lot to do with it as well, but we had just cured it for too long, I suspect. It's because we were scared of food poisoning, and because knowing when meat is ready is something you kind of
feel and
suspect, so at first we were still learning - and getting it wrong
. Sometimes the x-grams per kilo doesn't quite work out, the shape of the meat is different, its fat distribution is different, the moisture content is different...
We found that shop bought (organic!) meat leached much more fluid than ours does, too, which made things a bit confusing when we got our own meat.
But from our third batch onwards it all went super and we never touch the commercial stuff anymore!
Did you refresh the water between the first and second hour of soaking? Proper bacon will always be
saltier than shop-bacon (it's a preserved meat, after all, meant to last for ages) but it shouldn't be inedible. Even if it is dreadfully salty, you can always blanch it before frying, so it's not lost!
Some salts taste harsher than others, as well.
Was it a slice or a chunk? Chunks will be chewier than slices as any chunk of dried pork would be. We're now using a professional slicer which cuts 1mm slices - always very crispy!!
And was it belly or loin? We used loin once, but that was much drier than belly (dissapppointment n# 2. Dissappointment n#3 was that our first smoked bacon had been smoked too much
).
Do you mean cold smoking or hot smoking?
It took me quite some time to light the cold smoker, but once the wooddust (not chips) is smoking, it does keep on going for the full 10 or so hours even, to our great surprise, when it's freezing outside.
The hot smoker is done by hubby (men & barbeques, hey
) and he soaks the woodchips which go in a bowl over the hot barbeque coals. I've never done the actual preparations for that, I'm just allowed to read the thermometer on top!
Hubby keeps hot coals in a separate little bucket bbq ready, in case the heat in the smoker goes down. It's a fine art, he says... I just think he likes poking in fires...
Don't give up on it! Just slice this batch as fine as you can and blanch it before frying.
Pretty soon you'll learn to judge the readiness of the meat and be a bacon connoisseur supreme!