How to make your own bacon at home
If not for Aristotle, I might have felt pretty bad about myself when I tasted my brother-in-law’s homemade bacon a couple of years ago.
He had shipped me a slab of it from Indiana, where he lives, and asked for my opinion. Its umber complexion was gorgeous, as if it had spent a week at a tanning salon. The texture was so firm, you might swear it had been working out. The capper? That dizzying scent of a perfect smoke.
I had tried making bacon years earlier, and when it never seemed to come out right — it was either too hammy tasting, too salty or too something else — I had given up. So when I sizzled up a slice of my brother-in-law’s slab and took a bite, I went from zero to jealous before I even digested.
And that is where Aristotle comes in. “Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men,” he wrote, “while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbor to have them through envy.”
I took the words to heart and turned my reasonable jealousy into a commitment to make myself get a good thing: better homemade bacon.
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I’m not the only one on such a quest. In this golden age of bacon, sales are growing every year (and now top $4 billion annually), bacon obsessives praise the singular qualities of Benton’s from Tennessee, Nueske’s from Wisconsin and Niman Ranch from California; and the flimsy, fatty stuff you loved as a kid has been all but replaced in your local supermarket case by thick-cut bacon, center-cut bacon, premium-cut bacon. (That’s not to mention a proliferation of products that includes bacon soda, bacon vodka, bacon ice cream, bacon pet treats and even bacon dresses.)
It was only a matter of time before a certain subset of bacon lovers started trying to get in on the action at home.
Up until six or seven years ago, Union Meats in Eastern Market sold about one fresh pork belly for every 20 salted ones. Then things began to change. “It started with all the chefs doing things on TV, and it just took off,” said co-owner Bill Glasgow. These days, the equation has flipped, with Union Meats selling 20 fresh pork bellies — about 50 pounds a week — for every salted one.
It turns out that bacon is one of the easiest impress-your-friends things you can make — once you know how. You cure a pork belly for a week, then smoke it. But if you take too many liberties with the steps (or the ingredients in that cure), you can go wrong.
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“Keep it simple,” advised Jason Story, co-owner of Straw Stick & Brick Delicatessen in Petworth, which specializes in house-cured and smoked meats. (Until recently, the operation was called Three Little Pigs, but it changed its name when New York’s Les Trois Petits Cochons huffed and puffed and blew the name down by filing a trademark infringement lawsuit.)
The advice may sound strange coming from Story, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. The shop, which he operates with his wife, Carolina, has made donut bacon, honey Sriracha bacon, even something they called cinnamon roll bacon. But that’s only because Story is good enough at curing meats to complicate matters and still have them come out great. As time went on, though, he wanted to challenge himself to make the best version of the classics.
“We learned,” said Story, who teaches classes in baconmaking at their store. “It’s easy to be the best in something if no one else is doing it. I want to be the best at doing something that everyone is doing.”
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These days, he offers basic styles, such as breakfast bacon cured with salt, dark brown sugar, black peppercorns and curing salt; a maple bacon; and a black pepper-coated bacon.
Share this articleShareTruth is, you have to master the basics before you can branch out. And when I first made bacon, I didn’t know how I was messing things up beacuse I failed to pay close attention. Even after I tasted my brother-in-law’s bacon and my jealousy motivated me to try again, my next attempt wasn’t quite right. That time, I had learned to pay attention, so I knew exactly where I had gone wrong.
I had added too much salt to the cure and left it on the meat too long, so my bacon came out tasting overly sharp. Since then, I’ve been careful to watch my proportions.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten a little wacky with herbs and spices. It’s fun to experiment. (Za’atar bacon, anybody? Kinda cool. Once.) Like Story, though, I believe that developing a great basic cure is the way to go, because then the bacon you end up with is that much more versatile.
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The main ingredient in a cure, salt, functions primarily to kill bacteria and thus act as a preservative. To prevent botulism (a relatively rare foodborne illness most often caused by improper home canning), sodium nitrite in the form of curing salt is often also used in cured and processed meats. But because bacon is fried before eating, botulism isn’t an issue, so the use of curing salt is considered optional.
Curing salt is pink (to distinguish it from table salt). The type used in bacon is pink salt #1 (#2 is for longer cures), and it gives the bacon a rosy color and, some say, a characteristic bacon flavor. I have made lots of bacon, some with and some without pink salt #1, and I don’t think there is a significant difference in the flavor of the meat. Sometimes I use it for the color, sometimes not.
Another option to consider is this: Pork belly often comes with a thick skin above a layer of fat. It isn’t difficult to edge a knife beneath a corner and wiggle it through to the end, removing the skin and keeping about a
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-inch layer of fat to baste the meat. But it’s even easier to have the butcher do it. Then all I have to do is coat the pork belly with the cure, seal it in a large plastic bag, and flip it every morning for a week. The final step: I smoke it over indirect heat for about an hour, just long enough for the smoke to penetrate.
I’ve come up with two cures that I like, one sweet and one savory. Neither is complicated. Both allow the flavor of the pork belly and wood smoke to shine through. Both also produce bacon that works beautifully on a BLT, to which I add a homemade jalapeño sauce for a hint of heat and brightness, and an avocado for a creamy mouth feel.
Thanks to a little jealousy and a push from Aristotle, I now have it down: a wonderfully fragrant, unctuous treat, vastly better than anything I can buy at the supermarket. Its flavor, you might say, is as deep as philosophy.
Shahin will join Wednesday's Free Range chat at noon: live.washingtonpost.com. Follow Shahin on Twitter: @jimshahin.
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