How to Make Homemade Bacon

[Music] foreign hello and welcome to Phoenix kitchen my name is Stacy Williams and I'm your host we're going to talk about fire food and flavor we'll discuss recipes and techniques for both indoor and outdoor where we'll add that secret ingredient smoke to get the most flavor out of all of our recipes we're glad that you joined us today while you're here please don't forget to subscribe to the channel to stay up to date with all our recipes if you like the content hit the thumbs up and leave us a comment if you make the recipe don't forget to share a pic we're on the road to our first 1000 subscribers when we hit a thousand we'll be giving away a five piece Lodge cast iron cookware set to be entered for the giveaway all you have to do is subscribe and leave us a comment now on to our video hey everybody welcome back to the channel today we're going to be making bacon from scratch we're going to get this beautiful result that you see here on the screen so let's get started now we're working with a pork belly that I picked up at Costco you can tell this is about a 12 pound pork belly it's already trimmed the Skin's been removed we're going to go ahead and get this thing opened up split into a couple pieces and we're going to work that into a wet brine so the first thing that we've got to do is to trim this up we don't need the small pieces on the end we want a nice square piece so when we go to slice our bacon we're going to be able to get pretty much evenly sliced pieces now the good news is we're not going to be losing this this is definitely not waste these pieces will go in to make sausage you can check out that video I'll have it linked below but once we get this thing all nice and trimmed up which is a little easier to do if you keep it partially frozen by the way we're going to cut it in half the reason we're doing that we're making this at home if you're like me you don't have enough room in your fridge for the entire pork belly or a container large enough to brine the entire pork belly so we're going to cut it into two pieces and what we end up with are pieces between four and five pounds each just depending on exactly how we mix it so what we're looking at is making a wet brine we're going to do a one to one ratio with salt that's kosher salt and everybody's favorite brown sugar we're going to put those in give them a nice stir because we need it to dissolve I'm actually going to move it to the stove in a few minutes to warm it up to help it dissolve now I am going in with two teaspoons of curing salt that's pink uh curing salt that's going to add the nitrates we need and then just for fun I like to add maple syrup to mine just to give it that little mapley taste that's so delicious we give that a little stir and we move it over to the stove and let it warm up for just a few minutes help everything dissolve while that's warming up we're going to go ahead and get containers one for each piece of pork belly I use disposable rubbermaids I pick them up at the local supermarket they're cheap enough put one in each and then we're going to bag up the extra pieces get those into the freezer because we'll be using those at a later date for the sausages now you can see these things fit perfectly into that into these little Rubbermaid containers that's the one gallon containers so the reason I like them is because of that fit Okay so we've got those pieces put away in the freezer we're ready to add the brine now we did add ice cubes to this Brine and let it cool all the way down because we don't want to start poaching the bacon we're going to fill these containers just about three quarters of the way we do want these to be fully submerged but the fun part is fat floats so the bacon is going to try to lift out you have a choice of putting some weight on top and covering them to keep them submerged or you can do like I do and just ignore the idea of submerging because you're going to flip these every other day you go in bring them out of the fridge flip it over so everything will get brined over the course of the seven to ten days that you leave it in your refrigerator so into the fridge we go okay it's been a couple days so we're going to take these out open them up check them and make sure that we flip them that way that top part will get down into the brine and then we'll continue to do this every couple of days for seven to ten days just depending on how long you want to brine as long as you go at least seven days you're going to end up with a quality product depending on when you're planning to do your smoke if you're like me that happens on the weekends um you know so you may have to wait another day or two and it's not going to hurt it to sit there in the fridge and wait on you all right through the magic of video editing it's been seven days and it's time for us to get our bacon out and prep it for the smoking process now before the Bacon's ready to smoke the Bacon needs to be rinsed in order to get all of the brine off of the surface of the bacon we're going to put it on a rack we're going to Pat that dry and then put it back in the refrigerator for a minimum of four hours this can be done the day before you're ready to smoke it is okay for these to sit overnight in the fridge waiting to smoke the next day once they've dried completely and are a little tacky to the touch you'll know that you're ready to put these in your smoker now before we can put these in the fridge for four hours there's one last thing that we have to have with our bacon if you noticed in the brine we did not use black pepper so you gotta have pepper on your bacon the pepper not only adds flavor but it also creates a little bit of a bark as you're smoking this so we're using coarse ground black pepper and we're going to make sure that we get this all over the surface and then we simply Pat it in to make sure that we've got a nice adherence to the surface now we're going to put the bacon back into the fridge for the four hours that we talked about and when it comes out it'll be ready to smoke so that means that we have time now to get things ready to do the smoking and the first step for that is going to be to fire up the smoker all right we're going to be smoking this today on the old country Brazos Offset Smoker we're going to be using a blend of Hickory and pecan because I love those flavors on bacon in particular now for this cook we're not actually trying to cook the bacon we're trying to smoke it we're only going to take this to about 150 degrees we do not want to finish cooking the bacon that's what you do after it's sliced up and you put it in your pan so we're going to go ahead and get a small fire built and we're going to run this thing low and slow and try to get as much smoke flavor as we can into the bacon all right wood stacked up this is my favorite part applying the blow torch look at that it's a thing of beauty come on fire load load load we're gonna put the flavor into the bacon all right so we're gonna let the fire burn for probably 30 minutes or so until we get a nice cold bed and then we'll close everything up let our heat build up into the chamber for cooking make sure we're running a nice clean smoke and then we'll get the bacon put on and let it smoke nice and slow [Music] all right so we've been burning for about a half hour time to check in on the fire looking in look at that it is low and slow not what you think it's not the temperature in the time it's built low in the Box we've got slow moving flames and then we have the nice whitest blue puffy smoke almost clear you don't want it to be clear if you run too clean there'll be no smoke flavor whatsoever and especially during the first part of the the cook it's okay to throw on a log and get a little bit of white smoke you just don't want that all of the time right you want to run a clean flame as much as you can and we look like we're in good shape here we'll give it a few more minutes to build up temperature in the cooking chamber and come back to check and see if we're ready to go all right after another 15 minutes we're looking good we've got a nice coal bed going got nice low flames and we've closed the damper down a bit and we check in on our gauges boom 225 other side of the grill running about 228 to 230. so we've only got about a five degree difference across the full width of the grill which is incredible we're running a great fire we're running great temps we're going to go ahead and add one more log on for smoke flavor and we'll go ahead and get the bacon put on all right so the bacon is on the grates ready to go we're going to go ahead and get this thing closed up if you notice in the Firebox that log we added has caught and now in full flame so that's going to send smoke through for us very well we'll close that box off too to get the temp back up into our cooker and we're going to check back on this in a couple hours to see how we're doing all right we've been smoking for about 45 minutes and it's time for us to check the fire uh we have to add a split every 45 minutes to an hour in this smoker with the size of wood and the amount of moisture that I've got going in them um so we go in we need to adjust our coal bed make sure that it's nice and even and spread out the way it needs to be and that any logs you have left are arranged so that the new split can lie across and touch those coals and ignite quickly what we're looking for is we want to make sure that we're running a hot enough coal bed that this log is going to ignite within 60 Seconds and there we go we have Flame nicely done go ahead and close it up try to keep that heat all right we're about two hours into the cook we've added a couple splits to the fire over time now we need to check the temperature of the bacon and see how we're doing now bacon will normally running uh at these temps 225 to 250 on the offset it's going to take about three three and a half hours to get to where we need to be which is 150 to 155 checking it right now I know you can't see it on the camera but these things are hitting about 130 so we're in good shape these are going to go for about another hour I am giving them just a little Spritz to keep the moisture going there on top and it helps to cool down just a little bit so we can grab just a little extra smoke because I don't want it to get too done too quickly we'll close her back up and come back and check in another hour all right we've been rolling smoke for about three hours and 15 minutes we're going to go ahead and give this thing a temperature check I'm going to guess that we're right about where we need to be and yeah 153 that's going to be perfect so we're going to grab these pull them off on a rack and allow them to rest and then obviously once they've rested we'll do my favorite portion the taste test all right roll that beautiful bacon footage guys if you could smell this it's amazing that Hickory pecan blend is just so incredible and we've got a beautiful bark on the top of this bacon it'll add a nice little crispy taste as we cook it there you see all around gorgeous ready to go can't wait to slice into this but we're gonna have to we need to let it rest about 30 minutes a minimum before we slice into it foreign we've given it our 30 minutes we're going to go ahead and slice into this now for me I like to slice off of the the short side because it fits in the pan just a little better obviously you can make long slices if you wish but I'm just going to go ahead and slice off two or three nice thick pieces because in my opinion bacon is meat it doesn't have to be that super thin but here you go there's a nice look on the inside you can see it's nice and pink it's cured it's smoked it's ready to go so we're going to go ahead and grab a skillet get it fired up put it in over a medium Heat and let it get nice and toasty [Music] [Music] foreign now as you can see in the video and hear that wonderful sizzle this bacon rendered down a lot of fat as it cooked so I'm gonna pop it on a paper towel just to absorb all of the extra grease which obviously makes it taste a little better go ahead and get that all nice and pat dry and ready to give it a nice taste all right so we've got it padded dry take a look at that oh my gosh gorgeous gorgeous bacon beautiful color nice and crisp and ready to go there's only one thing left to do just gotta take a bite put it in that mouth and see what happens oh flavor explosion it is absolutely incredible if you've never had homemade bacon I highly suggest you try it it's really near impossible to go back to store-bought I do have to buy a store-bought every once in a while since it takes a week to cure if I get low run out use something somebody asked for some and I give it to them all of a sudden I don't have bacon and I'm disappointed every single time no matter what brand I buy so the last thing we're going to do is get this sliced up now I do suggest you know we we cut into that for the taste test just to make sure we were in good shape but before I go into slicing this I do put it in the freezer for about 30 minutes uh because it's much easier to work through the slicer if that's frozen if you don't have a little countertop slicer like this obviously a knife will work uh the freezing definitely helps and make sure that knife is just as sharp as possible you can cut it as thick or as thin as you want that's one of the things that's better than store-bought because if you ever notice they say thick sliced and it's not here I'm going with the number five on there and you can tell it's just a nice thick cut bacon so we finished slicing this down put it into the container and you see it makes quite a bit of bacon looks beautiful we'll store this in the fridge and that's all there is to it we've made bacon at home hope you guys enjoyed the video

Channel: Phoenix Kitchen

Views: 301

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Id: HxjuoEvnyqg

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023