Everything you Need to Know About Smoking Bacon

welcome back to the channel everyone i'm john and you're watching simple man's barbecue today you guessed it we're making bacon again but instead of just cruising through the recipe and uh just making bacon i'm gonna explain a little more in depth all the things that i have done wrong and the recipes that haven't really worked out so well and about going on 300 pounds of bacon now i've made in the last couple years so obviously you want to start out with some fresh pork belly everyone knows that but some issues i've had is is with my original rub the original brine right while the bacon does taste great when you add a lot of sugar to it what happens is it's really hard to cook and it ends up burning in the pan so not a lot of people like that another thing that i'm sure you all have heard about before is taking a bite of bacon fresh fresh off the grill or the pan and it's just a salt explosion right so i took it's taken me a while but i finally honed in a great recipe i used salt pepper garlic sugar cane paprika and chili powder now to kind of balance that so you don't get a salt explosion or one flavor too great greater than the others what i do is i just take a pork chop or a steak and i season it with my bacon rub fry it up cook it and just see how it tastes right if it tastes great i mean you're spot on but that's an easy way uh to fine-tune your rubs before you go through the whole process of brining the bacon waiting five days and then cooking it and then slicing up a whole 10 pounder and then not liking it so we're gonna start off right now with my rub like i said this is a sugar cane salt pepper garlic paprika and chili powder [Music] all right so some of you guys probably have uh vacuum sealers uh but i just have some big ziploc bags so i'm actually cutting these babies in half so they fit in the bag for the brine all right now we have them all seasoned up how we want so now we need to put them in bags and seal them with not using an extremely heavy salt or a ton of sugar you do need to add some liquid to your brine so we're just going to add one of my favorite pilsners so not only is your favorite pilsner going to really help even out all the flavors but it's going to help kind of liquefy everything and really soak into that meat all right those are you wondering uh we have about five to six pounds of pork belly in each one of these bags i'm gonna do a full 12 ounces of pilsner in each one of these bags seal it up leave it a little open on the end try to get all this air out beautiful now you're going to want to put these in the fridge for five six seven days uh i always recommend putting them in the plan because it has been known to happen that bags leak i've had it happen once and man does it make a mess um a lot of people like to flip the meat every couple days uh i do recommend doing that i will also be doing that and i will see you guys back in about five six days all right we're three days into the brine so i'm going to go ahead and flip all these over all right we're good to go and uh we'll see you guys in a couple days when we're ready to smoke these babies welcome back well the bacon's been in the fridge for about a week now it's time to unpack rinse off pat dry and start smoking some beautiful pork bellies here [Music] looks like it took really nicely to the brine and the smell coming off this is amazing all right for today's cook we're actually going to be hanging the pork belly this is my horizon ranger 16 inch offset smoker it has a little rod up here to allow me to hang the meat so we got these pork bellies rinsed off i got all my hooks in now i'm going to start patting this dry this is a very important part of the pre-smoke ritual or tasks whatever you want to call it if if the pork bellies are wet in any way the first you know our smoke is going to really soak into it and it almost becomes overwhelming so it is always very important in my process to pat these dry and let them hang up for about an hour to kind of dry themselves out now when i place a second rack in here i'm actually touching [Music] the first rack so what i do is i just place toothpicks in between the two racks to kind of hold it together so it can cook evenly i'm going to leave this open let it air dry for about an hour in the meantime i'm going to start my fire in the firebox and we'll get going here [Music] all right we're gonna let this fire burn down until we get a nice clean smoke and a good stack of coals [Music] all right i got a nice base of coals here some nice clean smoke i'm gonna close it up and we'll start smoking some bacon [Music] so we're gonna be maintaining about 175 200 degrees offset smokers really excel in smoking bacon the goal is to have the smoke slowly float over the meat right all right we're about two hours into the smoke uh i got about 150 in my bacon chamber uh i'm trying to get just a little warmer but that's good for now like i said we just want a nice smooth smoke smooth flow heat over this pork belly you need to make sure our smoke is really clean we don't want any harsh flavors every 45 minutes to an hour i'm actually going to have this little chimney here with some lump in it and i'll put it in the firebox to maintain that clean smoke it's very important that we draw this out and make it a slow process because if we cook this too fast like maybe sometimes you might in an oven or a big green egg because it's insulated so well you don't really have that flow of heat um the bacon fat doesn't really render very good uh so then when you s when you're all done you reach the internal temp of 150 slice it all up when you're frying it that bacon fat can can be a little chewy or a little rubbery texture and obviously we don't want that we want a nice slow smoke on this we really want that fat to render and we want to make some delicious bacon all right we're about three hours into our cook let's take a look on how the meat's doing we're gonna insert some probes looking good all right we're uh about 104 on the top one and we're 120 on the bottom one so i'm gonna keep on maintaining temp at about 150 175 we should reach 150 here in a few more hours all right we're getting real close to our goal temp of 150 internal i do have about a 15 degree difference between the upper and lower pork bellies so i'm going to flip them right now for the rest of the cook all right oh i'm gonna go on last all right we finally hit an internal temp of 150 on all four pork bellies uh so we're gonna pull them off and put them in the fridge uh once they cool i'm gonna grab one and slice it up tonight and we'll see how it tastes all right we cooled off here for about an hour it is still a little a little warm uh not as cold as i'd like it to be but uh obviously when you guys are doing this at home or whatever the colder it is the easier it's gonna slice these ran for about eight and a half hours so it's a nice slow smoke the heat rolling over the pork belly so the fat should be rendered perfectly and you get a nice crispy slice of bacon so let's take a look here look at that so we're going to cut some thin slices and well as thin as i can with this knife and we'll throw them on my other cooker and we'll see how it tastes see what kind of flavor profile we have and by thin slices i meant a quarter inch [Music] all right got four nice slices here let's throw them on and see how they turn out [Music] so the bacon i cut as a taste test uh wasn't cooled down all the way so i wasn't able able to cut it very thin so we're about a quarter inch to three-eighths of an inch so obviously it's going to cook a lot differently when you cut it thinner but let's check out how the flavor profile is [Music] got a piece right here [Music] that is delicious the smoke is very slight very subtle you get a little bit of sweetness from that cane sugar i added uh and then every all the other seasonings i added just kind of bring it all together and balance it it is amazing how fresh it tastes and how perfect the fat rendered during the smoke and then allowing it to cook correctly in the pan you know it's it's not chewy it's perfect i mean just just look at that it is it's amazing [Music] so like i said you know test out your recipes uh you know do whatever you want practice that's how you get good at this uh but the biggest thing the biggest thing is light smoke light clean smoke for a long time until you hit that temp of 150 internal you don't want to hit it too fast and you don't want your smoke to be too heavy you want those pork bellies to be dry when you place them in your smokers and then you are on the path for success thanks for watching everybody i hope you enjoyed the video [Music] a superman's bbq you

Channel: Simple Man’s BBQ

Views: 67,327

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Id: 0r9B7rvriaw

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2022