Home made bacon

[Free Range]

Anyone here make their own bacon or ham. I'm thinking about trying it, just wanted to see if anyone else has tried it?

[excelpoint]

Yep I do. I make a bit of home made bacon. All I do is take a Pork belly, put it in a glass dish, give it a good coating of a mix of Pink salk, rock salt and some crushed bay leaves. Cover the dish and leave in the fridge for 10 days. The salt mix draws out the liquid effectivly cureing it. It has a fairly salty taste so if you dont like it too salty just soak the slices you cut in some luke warm water for 30min before frying or eating as is.

[Bowjack]

Here are two links:

One is similar to Excelpoint's

http://www.3men.com/bacon_making.htm

http://hubpages.com/hub/Make_your_own_bacon_Homemade_bacon_tastes_fantasti c

[Brad B]

We use to butcher a few hogs each year. Did the whole process at my grandparents house. We had an old refrigerator here that we hung the meat in. My dad grew up with an old fashioned smoke house in their yard, as many people in this area did back then. He always told me you had to let air circulate around the meat. I don't remember what rub we used, but it had salt and sugar in it. That was some good bacon.

[excelpoint]

Ahh yes Brown sugar is another thing I put in. Takes a bit of the edge off the saltiness.

[falconpro]

Yep My dad had one of those old refrigerator smokers. He took our old fridge chopped the inside plastic out with a hatchet, pulled as much insulation out as possible, then started a big fire inside it to burn out the rest. The thing bellowed black smoke for about an hour until all the contaminates were burnt off. Then he swept out the dirty ash and installed the original racks back into it and set another smaller fire in the bottom to again season and smoke up all the insides. He loved to smoke Mullet fish in his. Some times a whole ham or deer roast. Don't remember any bacon getting smoked though. Probably would have been good. Smoked fish is hard to beat! to much gives me a stomach ache though.

[rmartin]

I have made both regular/belly/stripy and loin/Canadian/English bacon a few times. After curing, I smoke in my Bradley smoker. With the loin bacon, I smoke until the meat has an internal temp of 155F where I only smoke the belly bacon to about 125-130F. The loin bacon is fully cooked when coming out of the smoker where the belly bacon needs to be cooked before eating.

I would recommend starting with loin bacon. You can get a decent pork loin at a regular supermarket, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and the amount of bacon you get is manageable. To make belly bacon, I had to find a butcher shop that was actual a butcher shop that still could get pork belly, although they said it was technically side not belly. Even with half a belly, I still ended up with *way* too much bacon that ended up getting surface mold before we could eat it all (moisture in the ziplock bag ... doh!). The loin bacon works for both breakfast and bacon sandwiches(!). It tasted more like English bacon (bacon sandwiches!) than the Canadian bacon that we normally get in the US.