How to Cure and Smoke Your own Bacon + Pancake Recipe

Learn how to Cure and Smoke Your own Bacon, plus get my favorite Pancake Recipe

How to Cure and Smoke Your own Bacon

It’s not difficult to learn how to cure and smoke your own bacon. It just takes a few ingredients and some patience. The basic cure recipe I decided on was two teaspoons of pink curing salt and a quarter cup of kosher salt for every five pounds of pork belly.

Many cures call for a sugar or other sweeteners but I wanted to have some bacon with no sugar. Sugarless bacon is perfect for low carbohydrate and keto diets.

I’m going to show your one cure with no sugar and one that includes a sweetener. You can decide how you like your homemade bacon, both are delicious! I started with a 10 pound piece of pork belly. I leave the skin on and remove it after smoking. The smoked pork skin is great to simmer for broth. You can use skinless pork belly as well.  I sprinkled one half of my pork belly with my basic sugarless  cure and to the other half I added 1/3 cup of cane syrup (you can substitute brown sugar) and 3 tablespoons of chopped fresh rosemary.  Each pork belly half gets it’s own sealed 2.5 gallon bag and is parked in the fridge for seven days.

Here’s where things get tricky. So I totally forgot that we were going out of town to visit my parents right in the middle of this whole project.  It’s not really a problem, I just packet it up in a cooler with a few re-usable ice packs and off we went.  This actually worked out really well because my Dad loves this kind of stuff, I knew he would get a kick out of helping me smoke the bacon and he certainly has all equipment.

On day seven we took the bacon out of the bags, rinsed them, dried them and put them on a rack over a pan.  Back into the fridge uncovered for another day to develop the pellicle. The pellicle is a slightly sticky coating that forms around the meat during air drying, it helps to hold the smoke flavor as well as protect the meat from drying during the smoking process.

SMOKE. I chose applewood chips for smoking because I wanted a fairly mild smoke flavor.  Soak the applewood chips in water for a half hour before putting them on the coals

Get your grill ready by building a pyramid of coals on the opposite side of the vents, if the coals are under the vents the smoke will escape .  Place soaked and drained applewood chips into three seperate  foil packets and poke holes in the top of  them.  Place the packet of applewood chips on top of the coals and place a foil pan of cool water next to the coals. The pan of water helps to moderate the temperature. Place the grill rack on the grill and put the bacon skin side up over the pan of water.  Smoke the pork belly for two and a half hours at  between 180 and 220 degrees.  Your pork belly is now smoked but not cooked.

Now you know how to cure and smoke your own bacon. Remove the skin of the bacon and it’s ready to slice and cook.  It’s easier to slice if it is semi frozen so put it in the freezer for about a half hour.  The bacon can be stored in the fridge for a week or kept in the freezer for up to 3 months.

Here’s a recipe for some delicious pancakes to go with your homemade bacon.

Pancake Recipe

Demetra Overton

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 5 minutes mins

Cook Time 20 minutes mins

Total Time 25 minutes mins

Servings 4 -6 servings

Ingredients

  

• 1 ½ cup milk
• 1 T lemon juice freshly squeezed
• 1 egg
• 1 3/4 cups ap flour
• 2 T sugar
• 2 t baking powder
• 1/8 t salt
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 t vanilla
• 2 T melted butter
• canola oil for the griddle

Instructions

 

• Pour fresh lemon juice into the milk and let it stand for 5 minutes.
• Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a bowl and stir.
• Add the egg to the milk and beat well to combine, add vanilla
• Stir the milk mixture into the flour mixture to combine.
• Stir in melted butter
• Brush your griddle or pan with oil
• Heat your griddle or pan to medium/high
• Pour pancake batter onto the griddle to make 3 inch pancakes (about 2 ounces of batter each)
• Cook for 1-2 minutes per side when bubble form and break flip the pancakes and cook for an additional 1-2 minutes.

How to cure and smoke your own bacon