How to make Hickory Smoked Bacon “Slab To Slice” | The Bearded Butchers

[Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] today's video is called from slab to slice we're going to take a pork belly we're going to trim it out of this pig we're gonna go all the way through how to trim it our commercial smoking we actually back up a little bit the brining the smoking and then the slicing so today you get to see from slab to slice we're just going to prep this and get this belly pulled out of here first thing we're going to do is take the ham off foreign once we get the ham off here now we can go for the belly get it up on our bandsaw take the shoulder off now we're going to separate the loin from that Fresh side this is where I'm going to hand it off to Scott and he's going to do the next step all right so spare rib is still attached and we just need to take our spare rib off of here we want a nice thick belly while everybody loves thick spare ribs nice thick piece of bacon is also pretty fantastic there's the rib now we got our slab like so it's gonna Square it up make sure we don't have any little bone in the end there beautiful slab of pork side to make some bacon now we put it into our brine which this brine is just um basically the commercial version of our just plain vanilla brine that we have the video on for you to do it at home sea salt sour juice powder which my Barrel is not dirty it's just stained from the celery juice powder it's going to soak in here this is slabs I didn't weigh it but it's roughly 10 pounds I would assume and it'll soak in here uh for about seven eight days and then into the Smokehouse foreign days it's Monday morning it's time to get these bellies into the Enviro pack Martini 280 Smokehouse we're gonna put these in here and they're gonna sit smoke over real hickory wood chips probably about five and a half six hours so first step that we're gonna do is we're just gonna get them hung so what you want to do so we take our pronged bacon hook we go right at the top of that belly get our smoke stick on our cart let's go down through and we grab a belly like this you can see that celery juice powder on there and that brine that's the reason for the color of the slab and we just grab each one hang it on here and let it drip for a little bit [Music] now that the bellies are hung we just chop our whole truck right into the oven push we don't want any of these slabs to be touching each other while they're smoking because then you'll get discoloration from your smoke all the bellies are hung we're going to probe them we're going to probe them in the thickest portion of the biggest belly which is usually right at the top where we hooked them so get them probed let's get them sealed up we're going to go into our schedule pull up smoked bacon run cook schedule and off she goes right now those bellies are 37 degrees coming out of that brine we're going to take them up to about 153 degrees we're going to hold them there so keep in mind that these are going to be fully cooked when they come out of here and go into our cooler and I want to show you this over here we use a real hickory wood chip we fill our smoke generator with our real hickory wood chips and those wood chips they auger down onto what's called a hot plate down here so those chips are all going to fall onto this hot plate then that's what creates the that's just leftover Ash but creates the smoke that is going to smoke these bellies so hickory wood smoke into our Marquee 280 Enviro pack Smokehouse we're expecting about five and half six hours this schedule it's uh it's built in to the MP 2500 controller this electronic controller it's all computerized we can go down to the minute throughout this uh the stages of this cook so per USDA we can cook pretty much you know whenever we want because we can go back through and look at our schedules and see a graph to make sure everything met temp like it's supposed to so when these are done the buzzer is going to go off and then from there we're going to get them into the cooler so check back we're down to the last minute so we're about six hours in almost just a little over six hours um we're in stage number five so this stair steps through the different stages as it's smoking um it's gonna click off here in a just a little bit and then we'll go in we'll check our schedule to make sure we met all the temperature requirements we're gonna sign off on it and then we're gonna get these out and we're gonna put them in the cooler and let the chill process start so the oven shut off now what I want to do is I want to go into the Data Logger I want to open up the history file pull up the smoked bacon so smoked bacon and we can look at the different probes so we have humidity core probe and temp and you can see how it's the the temp is the red one how it stairs steps up and the yellow one is the core probe I can go in here and I can do averages report and I can see that we a core probe temp a finished core probe temp of 154.5 max value is what we met so that means that that product is fully cooked it met temp and now what I can do is I can come in here I pull up the file we open it and we do add signature so let's go ahead and sign off on this now that's finished let's pop open the door see what we've got this is always the best part because the smell of bacon and hickory smoke just comes blasting out of here and hits you in the face ready for it ready oh look at those beauties so we get our temperature probe out and let's pull these out of here get them set floor and let's take a peek let's just take one off the cart and have a little look so there you have the hickory smoked bacon I'm gonna get these into the cooler and then the next time you guys see me we're gonna be right here on the slicer we're going to get them sliced up and we're going to get them into a package but in the meantime they're going in the cooler we're going to get improved we're going to monitor the chill down we're going to record that through the whole process we're gonna have to bacon all right for us grilling season's 24 7 365. but it's a lot more fun in the summer grilling accessories make the job so much more fun in addition to the spices and sauce we have bearded butcher butcher paper um great for wrapping briskets pork butts pull them through the stall it's also got many other uses like a nice prep surface you can roll it out prep or season on top of it throw it away gloves that are rated over 1400 degrees because you're going to have a hot fire somewhere you throw the gloves on they make it just a lot nicer not going to burn yourself thermometer I use this thermometer not only to make sure I'm reaching a safe temperature or more importantly not overcooking my food but also if I'm even reheating Foods I want to know if they're warm enough in the center I use that thermometer all over the place fire starter should get your grill lit nylon bristled grill brush bearded butcher flipper these items are obviously awesome all year round make great gift items for Mother's Day Father's Day so make sure you come see the bearded butchers for not only your spices and sauce but all your grilling accessories as well you've seen the process of what it takes to get the pork belly to this point now what we're going to do is we're going to get it on our Burkle 180 GS slicer this thing's been around here for years it's like a dinosaur of meat slicers but she just works flawlessly we love this machine so this this belly is hickory smoked went into the enviropak 280 like you saw Next Step all we have to do in this process of slab to slice is get it on the bacon slicer and let's get it sliced first thing we do is we just remove our meat hook and this is why it's important that we show you when we trim these bellies you you may think that we're wasting that product's going into sausage so we're not wasting but we want this to fit into this channel on our slicer and if it's too wide and too long it won't we won't be able to achieve that and also just remember that when you're when you're siding your pig when you're skinning it you don't want to put big knife gouges and grooves in it because that's going to affect the way your overall bacon slice looks as well it'll have big big slices in it so you want a nice smooth exterior on this slab so you have a nice finished slice also the height has been removed so you may see a skin on slab this is skinless because we did remove the hide on the kill floor so all we do is we get it set in our channel here we've got some teeth on our bacon slicer we go ahead and crimp it down that's what holds it in place and we just move this forwards right until it almost touches the blade you can see right there and then we have our four fingers that we can Notch down and this holds it in place because what you want to do is you want that slab to be nice and stable going through that slice so you get nice even slices so once we have the slab set in here we have our we have our thickness set we do kind of an old-fashioned slice around here um it's a little bit thicker slice it's not your commercial real paper thin bacon that's not really our liking it's more of an old-fashioned thick sliced bacon that's what we like so let's flip the switch on this Burkle 180 it's got a conveyor belt on it so you can see it'll it'll slowly shingle out the slices and this piece right here has little tiny teeth on it that hold each slice as it's coming down on our platform so it doesn't just fall you can see those beautiful bacon slice shingles going out onto that conveyor and what we'll do is we'll grab these in in about one pound chunks and then we'll run them through our packaging machine which you'll see here in a little bit there's the whole pork belly all laid out on the conveyor and you can see just these awesome slices cured with the celery powder and sea salt like you saw beautiful no cure spots or anything there nice uh nice balance of meat and fat not too much fat but fats flavor especially in bacon so let's get that tucked back in there and there's our entire slab of hickory smoked pork belly ready to go in the package packaging machine we also now what we do is we have this little tiny chunk left over and this makes the perfect little cubes to add into some beans some bean soup or just to add flavor into whatever you're cooking maybe you want to fry it up and add it to a salad or whatever you prefer so that's the only little pile of scraps that we had off that whole belly so that's why we Square those up like we like we do during the first process that you saw so I would like to mention that when we run this in our Enviro pack 280 this product is fully cooked so we take this up to a temperature of about 154 and we hold it there so we obviously you can put this in your frying pan and finish crisping it up but this product is fully cooked so you can just eat it right off the table um delicious [Music] my job's complete look at that beautifully sliced bacon now I'm handing this over Scott and he's taken over on the vc99 so professional packaging is definitely what separates the you know the amateurs from the professionals if I were sliding these into the individual pouches like we used to do for the vacuum chamber back they would get all messed up but with a thermo forming packaging machine like this one it forms the tray right in front of me and literally just about anybody can do it especially if I can so kind of sounds a little bit like something from Willy Wonka's factory but these things are not to be intimidated by they just allow you to have ridiculously professional packages that just about anybody can do [Music] bring home the bacon felt like he was getting ready to say something right back to where it all started right here in the processing room you saw the pig come out of the cooler you saw us pull the Fresh side you saw us cure it you saw smoke it now you get to see it in these beautiful packages all prepped and ready for the retail right here at White Feather Meats looks beautiful um obviously commercially you put in different practices now this may look pretty refined but of course there's people that do this on a much much much larger scale we're just kind of on the low end of the medium scale it's about 200 pounds there so great way for us to Market one of the best things that comes off of a pig and Scott and I stepped out of our rolls just a little bit I don't typically do the slicing he doesn't typically do the packaging but we wanted to make the videos that's why you saw us getting involved in that portion of the process so hopefully you guys enjoyed it make sure you subscribe make sure you share this video to anybody that absolutely loves bacon because I know we do so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Bearded Butchers

Views: 109,843

Keywords: The Bearded Butchers, Bacon, Hickory, smoked, food, breakfast, pork, pig, butchering, butcher

Id: TW-kx2wVYc4

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023