Homemade Applewood Smoked Bacon

[Music] so this is actually one of my most requested videos and i've never made a video on making bacon making bacon this is kind of fun to say making bacon now i've made bacon before it's just one of those things that if you do this at home and you can create the flavors you want in the bacon it's amazing now this is not a one day process this is a multi-day process you know the first thing we're going to do here is get our cure ready for the bacon now there's different methods of making bacon the curing method is one and that's what i'm doing today curing basically helps prevent bacteria from growing and gives flavor to the bacon now when you're doing this it's important to follow different directions and measurements based upon the weight of the piece of meat you're using i've got 11 pounds of pork belly and pork belly is the basis for making bacon now you're going to find different ratios if you look online of how much curing salt to use curing salt is a pink curing salt number one i'm using 0.25 percent which means if you have 11 pounds of bacon which is roughly 4989 grams you're going to be using 0.25 percent of that which is about 13 grams of pink curing salt and that pink curing salt is going to go in with the rest of our ingredients now really quickly pink curing salt is not just salt you don't just eat that it can actually poison you if you eat it straight it's pink to distinguish it from regular table salt now i'm going to be doing two different flavors of bacon today i've got my 11 pound slab of pork belly divided in two one of them is going to be a pretty straight forward sort of a little bit peppery bacon the other one is going to have the addition of some hatch chili pepper flakes a little bit of heat to it so we're going to make the basic cure first and then divide that in two now i have a little bowl here just to mix the cure in and it's on my scale now let's turn our scale on i'm going to put the bowl on here and you probably can't see that but it says 202 grams so i know this bowl is 202 grams so when we have all the cure together and i want to divide it in two i know that i can subtract 202 from that weight and that will give me the weight of the cure that i have first ingredient is 124 grams of salt i'm using kosher salt now comes our cure roughly 13 grams of pink curing salt number one sometimes it's called prague powder number two is usually used for things like salami dried meats things that you're going to be drying i've got 49 grams of brown sugar and 11 grams of ground black pepper i'm just going to mix this all together in here [Music] and if you've got a couple little chunks of brown sugar that's stuck together in there don't worry about that all right we're going to weigh this now but you might say well why don't you just add all the grams and everything together that it was and subtract the bowl well you know a little bit spilled out let's look and see what we actually have so we have 402 grams minus the 202 grams for the bowl 200 grams we're going to split this into two 100 gram portions and then i'm going to add my pepper flakes to one of those so i've got my scale here and i'm just going to go ahead and turn it on putting a little deli container on there we can see that is 28 grams but now i can just zero this out by hitting this button tear t-a-r-e so now it's zero grams anything i add there's just going to be measured as the weight of what i'm adding so i want a hundred grams of cure in here 96 100 whoop 99 give it a little 100 so now the rest will go in another container that'll be 100 grams but here now i'm gonna add my chili flakes and i'm adding eight grams of some red and green hatch chili flakes [Music] and just give this a good shake [Music] there we go all right let's get our pork belly out here and get it seasoned up so here is one slab of our pork belly it was an 11 pound slab which is pretty wide this is about five and a half pounds here just gonna go ahead and get the cure the seasoning on this and i'm gonna do this one as just the basic one the one without those chili flakes so that when i move the chili flake one over here to put that on there if i did a reverse i might get chili flakes on this one so we're doing the regular first and i'm just going to shake this on move it around kind of massage it a little bit and now let me just show you on the back real quick here this is just the fat there's no skin left sometimes you'll get a pork belly and there'll be pig skin on it still you'll have to trim that off if you do but honestly most of the time in fact i can never remember a time when i've purchased pork belly and had the skin still attached maybe if you get it directly from the butcher and that's how they do it you might but this is just the fat another thing is sometimes people will score this put you know diagonal cuts through it a little diamond pattern but i don't like doing that because that's not really how bacon looks when you get it from the store that hasn't been scored so i like to do it this way so i'm just going to start shaking some on here [Music] and just kind of rub it around get it into the meat [Music] let's get our backside and there's going to be pieces falling off we're going to push those back into the meat get everything covered on here [Music] let's get our edge here just want to kind of gather all this extra here get as much of as i can on here if you want you could do this with a shaker and there's lots of different flavors you could do in something like this it's really up to you beyond just that basic cure i mean really the basic here is the pink curing salt and the salt and sometimes sugar but you can add gosh just about anything people put you know cumin to get sort of a southwestern flavor sometimes that's pretty intense to me you can add juniper berries have been ground up you could add sage all sorts of things you can do all right now this is gonna go in a ziploc bag and then we're gonna move on to our second one we've got our second five and a half pound piece of pork belly here and one thing i want to mention is i know some people they also do a like a maple glaze on this so if you wanted a little bit of maple flavor you could rub some maple syrup on here it's a nice contrast with some of the heat too but we're going with a little bit of straight heat today [Music] you can see those chili pepper flakes in here [Music] same thing we'll gather up some of the excess it didn't get on the meat just put it on there kind of rub that in [Music] all right i'm going to go ahead and get this into a ziploc and then i'm going to talk a little bit about the process from this point forward so i have each bag on a rimmed tray now this is just in case you get some leakage there will be juice that comes out of these moisture will be pulled out of the bacon that's part of the curing process you want to make sure that your bags are sealed tight and one of the things is you see how this sort of flap can go over this way and if you did get some leakage it could come out over here i just like to take a little plate something small put it on top that just keeps that opening up here so you have less of a chance of leakage coming out now this is going to go in the refrigerator has to go in the refrigerator and it's going to take about seven days you can go longer but i'm shooting for seven days after seven days we're going to take this out we're going to brush off a lot of the excess seasoning on the outside we're not going to rinse it some people rinse it i don't like to rinse it i like to just knock off the excess and then it's going to go back in the refrigerator uncovered on a tray with a rack in it for 24 hours just to sort of firm up and it creates almost a little surface skin on it they call it a pellicle so this is going in the refrigerator i'll see you in about seven days [Music] so our bacon has been curing for seven days now what we need to do is take it out of those ziploc bags that it's been in and kind of pat it dry knock off some of the extra seasoning a lot of people will rinse it i think i mentioned that earlier in the video i don't like to do that i just want to knock off the excess and get the moisture that's really on the surface off as much as possible and then we're going to put it on the trays with a rack on it so that it's up off the bottom i'm going to start with the bacon that has just that base sort of cure on it get this out here [Applause] and if you touch this you'll feel that it's firmer than when we started you don't want it to be mushy i'm just gonna dry here and any of the seasoning that falls off that's fine but i'm not gonna like trying to wipe this off i want that on the surface some of my favorite bacon when i go to a store and buy bacon are the ones that have those flavorings like jalapenos and things on it where it's nice dried little bits on the surface i love that get this side here dried off [Music] and now for our hatch chili bacon oh that's looking good that's feeling good and firm and again i'm just trying to knock off any super loose bits of seasoning and get some moisture off the surface here now if this didn't look very different from the other bacon i would mark it somehow put a toothpick in it so that when it came time to smoke it i wouldn't confuse them after it was done but this has enough of that chili flake on the surface that i don't think we're gonna have a problem there so here we have both of our slabs of pork belly that is gonna become bacon pretty soon we've done the cure now it's just gonna go one more night in the refrigerator uncovered dry out create that pellicle and then tomorrow we're going to smoke it up using applewood out on the grill [Music] so now before we can enjoy our bacon we need to smoke it so it's been in the refrigerator overnight developing that sort of pellicle the skin on the outside it's just almost like a filmy surface covering and that can help with smoke adhering to the surface i know you'll hear some people saying it doesn't work if you don't want to do it you don't have to but i find it does work so i have the camp chef woodwind wi-fi 24 set to 200 degrees and we're going to go until we get to an internal temperature of about 150 degrees now i'm burning applewood pellets today for some applewood smoked bacon so let's go ahead and get our cured pork belly on there and smoke it into some bacon it's going to be a tight fit but we'll make it work [Music] and this is actually the jerky rack for the camp chef that i'm using it's perfect for the bacon keeps it up off the hot grill plate down there works well i'm using a needle probe today for the thermal work smoke x4 and i'm just going to try and get it in here it's called it's not going to be dead center but this bacon is you know an inch inch and a half so it's not going to be terribly thick and terribly long cook [Music] and once we hit 150 degrees i'll just be taking that inside let it cool for just a little bit then we're going to slice it up fry up some and make some blts [Music] so we hit 150 degrees internal and here is our bacon now i set outside we were going to bring it in just let it cool a little bit and then slice it changing plans i'm actually going to let this chill overnight first it's going to come down to room temperature it's probably going to take about 30 minutes then i'm going to wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator overnight i'm going to wrap it tightly in plastic wrap to help retain some of that moisture you don't want it to dry out too much it'll chill down nicely in the refrigerator overnight we'll get good slices tomorrow i'm not going to use my slicer my electric slicer because in know honestly the thing's a pain to clean once you use it so we're going to be doing this as if you don't have a slicer because most people don't you can get good slices you just have to take your time and this is the hot smoking method it's not a cold smoking method a lot of the bacon you buy commercially that's cold smoked this is the easier way to do this at home you can cold smoke but it takes a longer time you have to make sure you maintain a cold temperature in between smoking sessions because you do not want the bacon to go bad you don't want it to spoil this way you are actually cooking it to a safe temperature that 140 550 degrees and then slicing it and frying it up so this is really the simpler way to do it at home you could also take the cured bacon before you even smoke it slice it and fry that up that's fine too you just got to keep it cold at every stage before you cook it so this is going to get chilled down and i'll see you tomorrow when we actually slice it up and make some really delicious blts [Music] well here is our bacon this is one of the slabs i have the hatch chili bacon off to the side i'm going to slice some of that up off camera but this is looking really good nice and firm it's chilled down overnight and in case i didn't mention it earlier in the video when this goes into the refrigerator that first time in the ziploc bag after we've put the cure on it you want to turn that bag every day so in a seven day cure you're just going to turn it seven times and that just helps distribute the liquid that's in there that gets pulled out so you don't have part of it just laying in the liquid it just helps an even cure happen and like i said with this i could have pulled out my slicer but that thing's a pain to clean and not everybody has a slicer but pretty much everybody has a knife i'm using my long slicer knife today this is the one i usually use with brisket but any knife you have will work and especially if it's really chilled down like this you could even put this in the freezer for say 15-20 minutes to firm up even more and help you get some good slices we're going to first get this end piece off nothing wrong with it i can cook that up and eat that too but i want to get to the inside [Music] ah there is some nice looking bacon in there look at that inside but now let's get some slices because we're going to fry some of these up for a blt and after i get a few slices what i'm actually going to do is portion this down i'm going to vacuum seal it and freeze it basically in about one pound sections some are going to be a full length one pound the other are going to be cut in half because honestly when you're doing things like bacon for burgers or for blts you're not really using the whole piece you're using a half piece so storing it's a little bit easier that way in a vacuum sealed bag let's get some slices here [Music] oh look at that [Music] just trying to get you know not super thin not super thick this is a great thing about making your own bacon you can make the slices as thick as you want that is looking good all right i'm going to go ahead portion this out get it in some vacuum sealed bags and in the freezer and then we're going to fry up some bacon and make some blts [Music] well here is a small plate of bacon most of it cooked to afs if you watch my videos where i cook bacon you know that's how i like my bacon afs acceptable floppy state i'm not into really crunchy bacon although some of these are a little bit more crunchy if i snapped that one see it snapped and this is a mixture of both the regular bacon and the hatch chili bacon i'm gonna go ahead and build a blt but first i'll take a little taste of this piece i just broke let's see that was some of the hatch i got a little bit of the heat but the thing i can really say about this is fresh it tastes fresh it tastes not processed it tastes like you made it and that's what's so fun about making your own bacon not just getting those flavors you want but just knowing that it's as fresh as it can possibly be let's go ahead and build a blt so i have a pretzel bun i'm gonna be using today i'm going to start with some lettuce on the bottom we're going to get our l on there first and then our b we're going to pile some bacon on here today [Music] and i'm not going to be stingy with it i'm going to see how much i can get on here another piece there maybe one more and then some tomato on top there now that's a classic blt nothing else added no mayo nothing we're going strictly with that let's crown it [Music] and i'm going to dive in [Music] when you consider the curing process the chilling process the smoking process and some more chilling process slicing and cooking i've spent about 10 days making this sandwich so i'm going to enjoy it here we go [Music] that is one great blt when you're eating the bacon with other things the lettuce the tomato the bread that smoke flavor is coming out now that applewood smoke flavor is fantastic now in the long run is making your own bacon cheaper than buying bacon probably not unless you get super good deals on pork belly but sometimes that reward is worth the extra little expense this is thyme plus the pork belly and the ingredients you use are not that expensive and man let me tell you this is a fantastic sandwich [Music] you

Channel: Cooking With Ry

Views: 67,605

Keywords: cooking, cooking channel, cooking with ry, ryne pearson, ryne douglas pearson, bbq, barbecue, pellet grill, bacon, how to make bacon

Id: xnOBWsTh31Y

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022