How to EASILY Cure & Smoke Sweet Maple Bacon at Home

what's up everybody welcome back to max grill Shack my name is Shane today we are going to cure smoke and enjoy our very own home cured maple bacon it's going to be delicious so stick around and here we have our birkshire pork belly so nice grade of pork belly weighing in just over 5 lbs it did come with the skin on I did go ahead and remove that didn't do the the most amazing trim drob on here rushed it a little bit if you can find it skin off I definitely would recommend it that's not a fun thing to remove but uh nevertheless we got it done and when you're trying to find your pork belly try to find something nice and consistent the whole way through you know imagine it being a slab of bacon that you want to slice up so don't be afraid to dig through the pile and and pick out something real nice this one's a little bit uneven I'm thicker at this end than I'm at the front but at the end of the day it's going to work out just fine but all we got to do here is transfer this pork belly into a container so that we can get our seasonings our Cure All in here and I am going for a maple bacon if you haven't had maple bacon it's absolutely delicious even smells amazing when you're cooking it so you do want to weigh out your ingredients make sure everything's on point with what you have so for me here I I measured it out for your cure mixture you should be about 2 and 1 12% of your weight so I did some quantum physics and calculated what I need here you know I did weigh it out in grams but just roughly I have a teaspoon of pink cure salt I'm going to go with three tablespoons of sugar two tablespoons of kosher salt one tblspoon of black pepper and half a cup of 100% pure Canadian maple syrup you can add to this make it your own I just want a good classic bacon with that delicious Maple taste okay and I'm just going to grab my dry ingredients here and get them all combined together in a bowl so that everything's going on nice and evenly just get that all mixed together all right there we go we got our dry mix Al together here now we're just going to go ahead and liberally coat this onto our meat Pat it in get it to stick on there flip it over get both sides we are going to be uh putting this in a sealed bag and popping it in the fridge it's going to draw out a lot of the moisture and everything's going to evenly distribute throughout it as it uh cures in the fridge anyway but we can certainly give it a good head start here by just getting it evenly spread over all of our pork belly and we want to use everything we've got here so you can grab your your meat get your sides down on everything as well all right there we go we got our salt sugar pepper mixture all evenly coating our pork belly next we'll grab ourselves a bag now if you don't have yourself a vac sealer you can certainly use a large zip top bag just make sure you're using something pretty heavy duty obviously big enough to put it in there and something that's going to seal nice and tight all right so here I've got my bag and just going to finagle this inside of there all right there we go pork belly in the bag next we just want to make sure we get all of our seasoning mix with our cure that's left over in our pan and in the bag with our pork [Applause] belly next I saved the maple syrup for the end I'm just going to pour this straighten the bag and then I can kind of massage it around inside once it's all sealed up in there but half a cup of our Pure Canadian maple syrup going in all right everything's in the bag I'm going to get this place cleaned up a little bit then we'll get this all vac sealed up all right and here we've got our little vac sealer pop this in there get all the air socked out sealed up then we can go and massage all of our ingredients around make sure everything's got a nice head start start being mixed in there before we pop it in the fridge let's [Music] go all right there we are pork belly our seasoning and our maple syrup all in the bag here now we can just go ahead and massage this in make sure that Maple syrup's getting everywhere all right there we go everything is nicely massaged worked in here on our pork belly all we got to do now is be a little patient this is going to take seven plus days so we're going to pop this in the fridge and all we're going to do every day we're just going to come in flip it over next day flip it over and keep going till we're ready to pull this out because this is going to draw quite a bit of the moisture out of the pork belly and that way we can make sure it's always going to be rotating and everything's kind of Distributing nice and evenly as it cures so we'll meet you back in seven days and after seven days curing in the refrigerator our bacon has been fully cured all those flavors have come together it's certainly stiffened up quite a bit it's got a a nice kind of deep red mahogany almost type color and this is looking really good you can see we got that pepper studded everywhere in there we know all those flavors got through nicely all we're going to do now is get this out of our bag and we're going to give it a very thorough rinse in the sink with some very cold water all right there we go we rinsed it off nice and thoroughly which you can also do for sure especially if you didn't weigh out your salt kind of precisely to the amount of meat you have think you might have overshot a little bit you can definitely soak this in some cold water in a container for one to you know 3 4 hours if need be one of the most foolproof ways to do it here make sure you're not too salty you can just slice off a little piece of the edge throw it in the frying P cook it up and give it a taste if you find it is too salty then give it a longer soak in some water until you reach your desired saltiness but because I used pretty precise amounts here when it came to the the salt and the sugar I think we're pretty safe just to give it a good rinse and Let It Go as you can still see we do have some pepper left on here and I am totally fine with that you might also find when you slice off a piece and try it maybe you want to add a bit more flavor you know you could certainly add a bit more Cracked Pepper to it now uh if you want to amplify those flavors and the next step here is going to be leaving it raised on this rack popping it in the fridge overnight and this is going to allow that pellicle to form and let it dry out a little bit we'll meet you tomorrow when we pull this back out of the fridge and get it on the smoker and here is our cured pork belly after it sat in the fridge overnight to go ahead and form that pellicle on top as you can see here it's got like a kind of a glossy gliss into it it looks kind of tacky and that's exactly what we want that way the smoke will adhere nicely we'll get good flavor penetration on it today we're using the treager pellet grill I have it preheating to 165 fah that is the lowest setting it can go I going to enable the super smoke feature to help enhance that smoke flavor as well as add an amazing smoker tube filled with pellets the amazing smoker tube works great for adding smoke flavor without heat which was what we want here trying to do a bit of a cold smoke if you will if you can run lower you know 150 Fahrenheit would be ideal on the smoker but use the lowest setting you can do I've seen people smoke it to 120 internal Fahrenheit 130 140 150 160 but I am opting to go to 135 fenit internal today and I'm just going to keep it on this wire rack that's going to make it nice and easy to take on and off the grill let's get this outside and on the smoker all right we have our Maple pork belly ready to go on the grill I do have my Hopper loaded with Maple pellets as as well as my smoker tube we're going all Maple here figured why not stick to the maple theme for our fuel as well we'll just get it torched to our pet tube here and get these going and I'm going to enable the super smooth feature here as well once again we're set to 165 F on the trigger and I am going to put this on my upper wrap that's going to help uh elevate it away from the fire pot at the bottom allow a little more uh air flow convection around the fork belly go all right there we go going to shut this down let it smoke I'm going to probably say about 4 to 5 hours but the important thing here is the internal temp we're going to keep an eye on it and go until we hit 135 F internal and after 4 and 1/2 hours running at 165 fit on our trigger pet smoker this pork belly is bacon beautiful color looking great got some nice smoke on there but it's time to pull this off and bring it inside all right and here is our once birkshire pork belly cured smoked and turned to bacon looks amazing beautiful color on there I'm excited for this one I wish I could say that we are ready to just slice it up and enjoy it but bakon is a bit of a process thankfully the majority of the process and time involved tears hands off we're just waiting and now that we've got this off the smoker cool down the room temps all we need to do here is pop this into a sealed bag and let it go in the fridge for a few days and this is going to help all that smoke flavor uh kind of permeate through equalize on the meat itself and this is just going to give it a lot better flavor profile when we go to cook it as much as I want to slice some of this off right now and throw it in the frying pan I am going to wait so we'll meet you back here in a few days when we're pulling this out and getting it sliced up so we can give it a taste and the time has finally come our bacon is ready to slice up and enjoy now my slicer is pretty limited sizewise I I know I can only fit about 7 in slab here so I do need to trim this down a bit it's kind of uh an odd shape kind of want to square it up anyway here we're just going to go right down here and slice that off that smells absolutely delicious let's take a peek at that there we go and then I'm just going to do the same on my ends here as well just to square it up all right there we go and like I said these trimmings definitely aren't going to go to waste I can Cube this up add it to some other dishes where I want some nice chunky bacon pieces so I'm going to set these off to the side so we can get this sliced [Music] [Music] all right and just keep adjusting it if you need to on your thickness till you get the size of bacon that you want I think that's looking pretty good to to me a nice thing you could do here too is of course make some thinner pieces make some thicker Cuts mix it up a little bit but at the end of the day make what you [Music] want all right there we are big beautiful pile of Home cured hom smoked maple bacon but you know we're not done yet cuz we need to give this a try so let's bust out a frying pan and get this cooking okay the time has come after nearly two weeks of prep work making our bacon I've got some crispy fried bacon here ready to try I'm excited for this one let's give it a taste cheers oh wow that is delicious you're definitely getting some sweetness coming through with the help of that sugar and of course that Canadian maple syrup definitely not too salty that is really good bacon honestly probably one of the best Bacons I've had absolutely delicious nothing better than uh putting in some work all that time and getting an end result like this because this is phenomenal this home cured and smoked maple bacon as an absolute win I highly recommend giving this one a try it's honestly not all that hard to do like I said you're just waiting around you don't really need any special ingredients a little bit of cure salt and uh you will have yourself a nice pile of delicious home cured bacon like I got here and I do thank you for sticking around for another one super fun easy video here took a little bit time to get going but I am so pumped about this one I'm going to have some bacon for a while and that is a good thing but if you like what you saw here today then definitely hit that subscribe button follow along to see what we get up to next week where we grill up some more goodness outside [Music] [Music] cheers

Channel: Mac's Grill Shack

Views: 608

Keywords: BACON, SMOKED bacon, maple bacon, apple bacon, traeger bacon, pellet grill, pellet bacon, cured bacon, cured meat, cured pork, pork belly, smoked, maple, maples syrup, maple syrup

Id: BULx0YK6MgU

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024