Our mission to smoke our own bacon began many years ago. When - we do not know. What we do know is this is not mere task, its a quest. We were put our paths many years prior and the millions of small "coincidences" which led us here is utterly mind boggling.
First things first. The recipe....
For our first batch of bacon we decided to play it safe and stick to trusted source. In this case we are using a recipe from Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. It is a simple little number.
The meat
This is where we first ran into trouble. It turns out that a pork belly is harder to find than one might expect. We tried a number of fine establishments including Central Market and Pete's Fine Meat without any luck. Our luck turned up slightly after Ben had the great idea to check an Asian food market. So we made a trip to Super-H-Mart in West Houston (1302 Blalock Rd) There were were able to find pork belly, but unfortunately cut into strips.After narrowly escaping the purchase of our very own Kimchi fermenter, in the end we had to order a 13 lb pork belly for the project.
Other supplies
The only other trick was finding curing salt. Again hard to find at a regular grocery store. Curing salt has either or a combination of Sodium Nitrite and Sodium Nitrate. The nitrate is important because it helps to inhibit the growth of bacteria - which is one of general tenants that we have come to live by. We choose to order ours. You can get the a number of places on-line, even from the little umbrella girl.
That is all for now check back for when the meat arrives!
