For years I’ve been saving my leftover bacon fat (grease if you will) for no apparent reason other than it might come in handy.   Well, when I was younger I used it for my Krafter Dinner instead of butter but that was about it.  For the last decade or so I’ve been pouring it into a large cup and when it filled I’d scoop it out into the garbage and start again.  I finally had a purpose for that fat!

We were eating chicken breasts for dinner and I had a bunch of whole chickens in the freezer from the last sale so I broke it down and seasoned the dark quarters (leg and thigh) with salt, bay leaf, garlic and clove in a medium freezer bag and promptly forgot it in the fridge for three days.  I have a lingering habit of forgetting about meat until it’s at the brink of expiration: luckily this chicken was still good.

I heated the bacon fat in the microwave until it was liquid and poured it through cheesecloth to pick up everything but the clear fat.  Found a decent covered oven dish and put the chicken in that and then covered them with the bacon fat: unfortunately I didn’t have quite enough to completely cover the chicken so I topped it up with olive oil.  Slipped it into a 185 degree oven for ten quick hours and it was done, or at least was fork tender.

I transferred chicken and fat to a container and squirreled it away in the fridge for a week.  Cracking it open and locating the chicken I pulled them out and scraped as much of the fat off as I could and put them in the oven for twenty minutes until they were warmed through.  The skin was soft so I them put them skin side down in a medium high pan and they crisped quickly.

The chicken was wonderfully tender and had a great mouth feel.  It tasted different from roast chicken: there was a slight smoky flavour from the bacon fat and tasted very rich.  The crisped skin fused to the meat and really added to the overall texture.

The fat was put into a container and regained it’s spot in the fridge for my next confit adventure.  I was able to get a duck and eight kilos of duck fat so more confit will be happening in the future.  It may seem like a lot of work but done in larger batches you can easily get several meals.

Our freezer was getting overcrowded with pork so I decided to take out sixteen pounds and make some sausage over the weekend.  My family seems to like smoked sausage the best so I made Hunters sausage (forgot the German name, sorry).  It’s a pork sausage with coriander and mustard seeds, dry milk powder and a little garlic.  I followed the recipe in Charcuterie and everything worked well.  The batch was too large to mix in my stand mixer so I did it manually and it was tough going.

The sausages above have grill marks because I smoke them in my Big Green Egg with the large plate setter; more on that next week.  I keep the temperature at 180 degrees and the sausages are smoked after about two hours; that pile above was done in two batches.  Unfortunately the edges of the grill get hot enough to leave grill marks, but they’re not for commercial consumption anyway.

I’m trying to perfect my sausage stuffing skills but they seem to come up lacking: I get too many air pockets and when I twist them there is breakage.  Both issues will be ironed out with practice.

A key part of the process is the air drying or curing.  It reduces the liquid and concentrates the flavours; with smoked products the low heat does the same thing.  My issue is finding the right spot to air dry: it’s recommended to air dry in a 60% humidity spot with a temperature of 55-60 degreees.

I have a cold room that maintains about that temperature in spring and fall with humidity about 65%: I know this because I picked up an inexpensive hygrometer for $20 and it gets the job done.  Summer got too hot in there and this will be my first winter measuring so we’ll see.  Lots of people online use an old refrigerator for curing but I don’t have one and am not sure I want to do that route anyway.

Above is my pancetta: it hung for two months.  Half of it was dry and very nice, the other half not so dry.  Since it hung that long I’m not sure what would stop the drying but am going to point the finger at stagnant air.  During the curing I had light mold develop several times that I cleaned with an oiled towel on the suggestion of Michael Ruhlman.  Some mold got into one end and I cut that off and threw it away.  I can roll it very tightly to keep mold out using a surgeon’s knot but the ends open slightly and I haven’t developed a nice tying technique to keep them closed.

My strategy this fall is to put a small oscillating fan in the cold room on a timer to get the air moving now and again.

• 5 lb pork belly (or loin)
• 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup dark maple syrup
• 2 tbs cracked peppercorns
• 2 tsp pink salt
• 1/4 cup kosher salt

Mix everything together and rub all over the pork.  Put the pork in a container (tub with a lid, plastic zip bag) and flip it every other day until firm, about seven days.  Put the pork uncovered in the fridge for one day and then smoke until an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit is reached.

Update 08-Jul-09

After this post was featured on Kitchen Stewardship I received a few comments and would like to give some tips.

If you’d like to make this bacon nitrite free then omit the pink salt: the finished product will not have the reddish colour you’re used to with bacon (as seen in the photo).  I get my pink salt from Butcher & Packer.

Smoking meat at home is very simple and can be done effectively with any barbeque.   I like smoking bacon with maple or apple wood, but any fruit wood is a good choice and should be available in your local hardware store.  Soak two handfuls of wood chips in water and then put them in aluminum foil with a handful of dry chips.  Fold the foil over like you’re making an envelope and then poke some holes so the smoke can get out.  If you have a gas barbeque put one side on low and put your wood chip envelope on that side.; for a charcoal grill build a fire on one side only.  Wait until smoke starts and then put the bacon on the other cool side: you want to maintain about 200 degrees Fahrenheit during the smoking process.  You’ll need about one envelope of wood chips every hour; I find my bacon takes about four hours.

]]> http://food.ebabble.net/my-bacon-recipe/feed 5 http://food.ebabble.net/makin-bacon http://food.ebabble.net/makin-bacon#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:49:42 +0000 Scott VanderPloeg http://food.ebabble.net/?p=10 Bacon is what started me on the homemade path and it keeps me there.  This past winter a local shop had pork bellies for $0.69 per pound so I picked up ten whole bellies and cut them into five pound pieces, wrapping them nicely and filling the bottom half of my freezer.

Every few weeks I pull a piece of belly out and make a good breakfast bacon.  I say breakfast bacon because I like dark brown sugar and maple syrup in the cure, along with salt, pink salt and pepper.

Pink salt is the uncommon ingredient in that list, but it’s sodium nitrite mixed with salt and coloured pink, as a requirement of the FDA.  Traditionally curing used saltpeter but we’re refined the process these last hundred years.  I order pink salt from the U.S. mostly because the cookbooks and recipes I use call for it.  In Canada there are curing products available at my local supermarket: they contain salt and sodium nitrite but say things like “use contents for 200 pounds of meat”.

Bacon is a very simple curing procedure and a good start for most people.

1. Mix the ingredients listed above and run onto the belly
2. put it in an airtight bag for a week in the refrigerator
3. take it out of the bag and let it sit uncovered for one day in the refrigerator
4. smoke it for 3-4 hours at 200 degrees F until the internal temperature is 150 degrees F

Most recipes call to rinse off the cure in step 3 but for the sweet breakfast bacon I don’t bother.  I use my Big Green Egg for the smoking, skin side down to take the heat and not char the belly.  The Egg is great for this, as it keeps a fire going for hours and can maintain a low temperature.  I like cherry or apple wood for this bacon and like to keep the smoke going for at least the first two hours.

When it’s done I take it off, make a small slice under the skin on one corner and use tongs to pull the whole skin off.  Do this while the belly is still hot as it leaves all the fat where it should be and the skin comes off clean.  I tried this once after the belly had cooled and did a whole lot of cutting, wasting a ton of great pork fat.

After my initial read I tackled cured and smoked bacon and have done about a dozen or so bellies since. I also made pancetta, an Italian cured bacon that’s rolled and hung to dry. The first one turned out good, but my kitchen wasn’t humid enough. This spring I purchased a whole pig from a local farmer so I could get great cuts like jowls to make guanciale. The pig jowl is very fatty with a thin layer of meat used most prominently in spaghetti carbonara. It’s prepared the same way as pancetta: a spice and herb mixture is applied to the jowl and it sits in the fridge for a few days, then it’s hung to dry.

For this I picked up a hygrometer to measure humidity and temperature around the house: unsurprisingly the cold room had the best temperature and humidity levels, 50 degrees and sixty percent humidity. I put the jowl in a cheesecloth sling and hung it for three weeks. When I took it down there was some green mold on part of the surface where there was meat and no fat: the exposed fat surface had no mold. I brought it to the kitchen and cut off the mold and sliced a bunch up to eat. Very similar to pancetta: a good pork flavour.