How To Make Measured Dry Cure Bacon At Home - How To Make Home Cured Bacon

hey everyone welcome back today we are continuing our series on making bacon at home and today we are going to do a measured dry cure bacon there will be some weighing there will be some basic math like grade for math so it's very easy and what I like about this recipe is that you can control the salt content most of the other bacon recipes out there that you're going to find if you're surfing around on the Internet just throw on the salt throw on the pink salt throw on the sugar just load it on there called the excess salt method you put on too much and then at the end of the curing process you rinse it off you taste it and it's going to be too salty and then they tell you to soak it in order to remove some of the salt it doesn't make sense to me why not just start with the right amount of salt and seasoning right at the very beginning so that when you get to the end of the process you can eat the bacon right away so that's what we're gonna do today it is a measured dry cure at its most basic it is salt pink salt and sugar the pink salt is prog powder or pink cure it's not pink Himalayan salt so if you think you've got pink Himalayan salt that's not what this is and then we're going to we've got two pieces of belly and we're going to flavor them slightly differently one just with pepper and the other one is going to have pepper thyme juniper berries and bay leaves so first things first is we need to weigh everything out so here's how this method works first thing you do is you weigh your piece of pork belly I'm gonna do it in grams because that's very easy for me the math is very easy bounces I'm not comfortable in ounces but if you like ounces go ahead and use ounces write down your weight now 2.5% of the weight of the pork is what you add as salt and you can use any salt you want just make sure it isn't iodized you don't want iodized salt next up is the sugar 1% of the weight of the pork is what you add as sugar 1 math is very easy now prog powder pink powder prog powder number one pink salt whatever you want to call it that is 0.25 percent of the weight of the piece of pork mix that all together and your here is ready to go okay so I've got everything measured out I've got the cure mixed together for each of our pieces of pork belly and to this one it's just ground black pepper it's so I know what you're thinking it seems like very little cure but a whole lot of flavor and here's the here's the reason behind that because we're doing an equilibrium type cure you don't need a lot of salt and pink salt to actually make this work also because it's going to air dry in the fridge and the second reason for the what seems like an enormous amount of flavorings is that a lot of the flavonoids that are in these flavorings won't actually penetrate the meat all that well so most of the flavor is only going to be on the outside of the bacon the only thing that will penetrate is the salt the pink cure and the sugar and if you're going to smoke it at the end like I'm going to do the smoke will penetrate but the actual flavorings will pretty much only stay on the surface so give this a really good mix make sure that it's really well incorporated and then we want to rub it into the belly now when you're rubbing this in you want to make sure you get it everywhere really rub it in get everything really well coated it's incredibly important and you want to put most of the cure on the side of the belly that doesn't have the skin on it the cure ratios that I have given you in this recipe are all about leaving the skin on the bacon you're gonna see that even though it seemed like there wasn't much cure when you go to rub it on it's gonna seem like a really big job to get it all rubbed in great so this is a dry cure which means you want the salt to pull moisture out of the pork belly and as that moisture is pulled out you want to drain away so you don't want the belly to sit in any moisture during this process so I'm lucky enough here in the studio to have these commercial kitchen bins they nest together it's got holes in it and I can put the pork belly in here and the water will drain into the bottom and it will never touch and over the course of three or four days you just tip off the water every once in a while if you don't have that at home which I don't expect you would why should you a glass baking dish with a rack it fits inside does the job just as well you want to make sure that you use glass or ceramic you don't want to use metal baking pan the salt reacts with the metal you could get off flavors this is a stainless steel rack so you're fine there will be no there will be no reaction and anything you can do just to keep it up out of the liquid and then you pour the liquid off every day so first thing is I put the pork belly in and I started out skin side down and any of the cure that's sort of left in the bottom of the pan here I just poured over top and the same with this one and it's it's interesting just in the time that it's taken me to rub the cure on I've noticed that already water is coming out of the pork belly it's already starting to work the salt is going in the water is coming out so there we have it now these go into the fridge for five to seven days these are about a kilo to a kilo and a half three or four days is really all these new to cure but the beauty of an equilibrium cure is that they will reach that equilibrium after three to five days but if you leave them in there 10 days 12 days 14 days they're not going to get any saltier and actually it will work better because the flavor will develop which is really what you want so just over a week has gone by and this pork belly is now cured you can see it's pretty dry and the cure has done its job now in the bottom you'll notice that not much moisture came out of these pork bellies or not much moisture drained into the pan it could be how long it took this pork belly to go from the abattoir to the grocery store where I bought it and it also could be the humidity level inside my fridge if my fridge has a very low humidity level the the moisture in the pork belly is going to evaporate rather than drain out so don't be worried if you don't see much liquid in the bottom at this point what I need to do is rinse off the excess cure and I'm gonna do that down in the basement in the brewery because I've got a nice big stainless steel sink now before we can smoke this I need to put it back in the fridge for 12 to 24 hours in order to dry out the surface this really prepares it for the smoking process and 12 to 24 hours is the recommended on the short side I've seen five six seven days in some literature I've tried it at that length of time and I really like the flavor that develops and the texture totally up to you I'd probably start on the short side the first couple of times and then go a little bit longer until you find the sweet spot all right so Glen you've been making bacon so tell me what have we got here so this set is all dry cure bacon Thank You bacon okay so Jack your pepper Reichert your juniper Oh dry cured pepper and dry cured junipers okay so these two go together in these two go together okay so the idea is they're all dry cured one has only pepper one has pepper and juniper and bay leaves and okay bunch of other spices and then just like last time I cut them in half I smoked half and I didn't smoke the other half so today we'll cook these up and do a taste test okay so similar to the last one so much of the last one get an idea of how much the pepper and the flavors penetrate okay you have a question well I was I was gonna say how much did you modify these recipes from the last one so the last ones didn't have any flavoring at all it was just cure okay so this is cure and flavor I'm good for and I've left the skin on last time I pulled the skin off before we got to this point I left it on because I needed something to attach I've got 12 pieces of bacon in the fridge and I need and I need to keep them I do like the safety pin method yeah I need to keep them labeled so that I can know what's going on so I certainly won't be eating the skin no I'll slice it and then cut the skin off so that excellent you're gonna slice it I'm gonna slicer time it slicing so here we go which one do you want to start with this one okay so that is juniper not smoked nope just pepper oh just pepper okay I supposed to start right away yeah wait for you to cut them off uh doesn't matter start right away I'm very good bacon I like the peppery flavor peppers pretty subtle though isn't yeah but that's okay I wonder I mean if I feel like it tastes different than the last time we made it but I don't know for sure it's still really good bacon oh yeah no okay so this one is same with smoke okay yeah you really get that smoke flavor and a slightly different texture - I'm getting mm-hmm it's not as dried yeah I think I actually prefer the non smoke but that's a bias I think more of a flavor bias for me then I would I would non smoke weed be my choice on that q okay so this one is the Juniper not smoked mm-hmm subtle though this is that time that taste yeah it's time and juniper and whole bunch of other things but yeah so I really like the time but it's not a flavor I expect to have with my bacon time though is something that is in breakfast sausage in this way you kind of get that it has that breakfast tea feeling it feels like it would go really well with eggs or other things like it complements other things interesting so this one is smoked hmm that won't I really like the smoke did it mm-hmm I wonder why this moved well that's just the way flavors work right the smoke really goes well with the something-something in the smoke and the juniper and the time it all kind of comes together whereas with the pepper it didn't work quite as well were you and I yeah that being said you might like something different so that's why the first few times you make bacon you should try a couple of different things and figure out what works and what doesn't you're like what you like and so these were smoked for two and a half or three hours maybe that's too long for you maybe that's not enough for you I know some people go eight or nine hours to me eight or nine hours in the smoker would be a lot of fun that would be too much smoke for me so this is dry cure we also have wet cure and brined bacon so you can check out those videos as well as well as the video where we make the smoker and we smoked the bacon more bacon all of these are winners though every one of these yeah other than whatever you would buy the grocery store it's a nice thick cut and I really like the texture yeah actually I think that's what of all the things that's that textures fantastic sounds great so tidy up time tardy up time swap of these two pans

Channel: Glen And Friends Cooking

Views: 144,084

Keywords: Le Gourmet TV Recipes, How To Make Measured Dry Cure Bacon At Home, home cured bacon, how to cure bacon, how to make bacon, how to smoke bacon, how to cure bacon without smoking, how to cure bacon with pink salt, how to cure bacon the old fashioned way, home cured bacon recipes, curing bacon with salt, curing bacon with salt and sugar, diy bacon, curing bacon recipe, curing bacon with pink salt, curing bacon without nitrates, traditional bacon curing, traditional bacon recipe

Id: LlvCFEgLZGc

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 02 2018