Smokehouse Bacon | How To Cure and Smoke Your Own Bacon

hey everybody chef britt here with atbbq.com and today we're making smokehouse bacon so bacon is one of those ingredients that can enhance the flavor of any dish whether it's the main attraction or part of the supporting cast and it's relatively easy to make and a great introduction into the world of charcuterie so i'm going to be guiding you through the entire curing process and then we're going to smoke it on the ys640s pellet grill let me show you how we do it so our basic smokehouse cure starts with two parts salt one part sugar today i'm using brown sugar because i love the flavor it adds um but we're also going to be adding a little bit of this cure mix from lem back woods here so for those of you who aren't familiar with the curing process this cure mix is a combination of salt and a small amount six percent to be exact of sodium nitrite now the nitrite is there to help aid in the curing process and to help rid of the chance of botulism occurring especially if you're going to do something like vacuum seal during the curing process it also has a distinctive pink color and that's to help cooks and chefs alike to distinguish it from regular salt so they don't get it mixed up so i'm using a relatively small amount and i've scaled it accordingly with my other ingredients all right so we're just going to simply mix this together to create our cure mix and this is roughly enough to create about 68 pounds worth of bacon now if you want the exact recipe ratio i encourage you to click the link in the description below and you too can weigh out exactly what you need to make your own cure for bacon so now that we have the cure made let's talk about pork belly right here i have some fresh pork belly this is actually about a third of a full slab and so we are going to wash this pat it dry and then weigh it so we know exactly how much cure to put on there so i've already gone ahead and washed this i'm gonna pat it dry now the reason why we are washing this is to sort of get rid of any extra scum that can happen on the surface during its packaging process all right so i have roughly three pounds 8.8 ounces worth of meat so for every pound i'm going to weigh out 24 grams of my cure mixture before we put the cure on i'm going to go ahead and just kind of go through and poke through this cap of fat now this is going to help the cure penetrate through that fat and cure the other side of the meat a little more effectively and this is something you'll definitely want to do if you have the skin on the pork belly so after a little math i know that i need about 85 to 86 grams of cure which that's a little much so now we're just going to rub this all over the entire surface of the pork belly let me pick some up here you probably won't have much extra just kind of hanging off of the pork belly this is enough to really just get the process going you really want to sit there and just sort of rub it in and make sure that it's starting to adhere this will start having a chemical reaction and begin pulling the moisture out of the slab of pork belly here so now i'm going to keep this covered and let the cure do its job for about seven to ten days and every other day i'm going to come back and i'm going to overhaul it which means just redistributing any of the liquid that has come out of the slab and just kind of make sure that it is curing evenly all right so just to show you guys i've got a slab here that i've been curing for about eight days and just upon first glance it's taken on a deeper hue in color and the meat is noticeably firmer so i know that this is pretty much ready to go we just need to prep it for the smoker now to do that we have to allow it to form a pellicle overnight but first we need to wash it all right so we're going to allow this slab of bacon to soak in some warm water for about 30 minutes and this does a couple things one reason being to prevent crystallization of the salt on the surface of the pork belly another reason is to help draw out any sort of impurities from the pork belly itself so we'll let that soak for 30 minutes we'll pat it dry and then get it ready to just form a pellicle in the fridge overnight all right so now i'm just going to pat this dry and just get the entire surface rid of any excess moisture now to form the pellicle we're going to allow this to air dry without being covered in the fridge and the pellicle is very important for getting smoke to adhere to the surface of our pork belly you get more smoke flavor when you form a pellicle basically so here i have a slab that has dried overnight and formed its pellicle so now we're ready to go right onto the smoker so today we are going to be smoking on the yoder smokers ys640s pellet grill i've got it set to 200 degrees and i've got it stocked full of hickory pellets now you can play around with flavors apple is a great option if you want something a little milder but i want to go for that great smokehouse butcher house flavor so we're going with hickory today so i'm just going to set this on the top rack with the fat cap up you can do the fat cap down if you want but i just kind of don't like the the pattern of the grates to kind of settle onto the fat so this is the way i i like to do it now we are going to just smoke this until it reaches an internal temperature of about 150 to 155 degrees so let's say that you wanted to impart a little extra flavor let's say with a barbecue rub right before you go on to the smoker is the best time to sort of add those flavors so today we're just going to keep it classic and just throw some smoke on it and we'll see it in a few hours beautiful look at this golden color this is about a little over three hours into our cook and i've got the probe in here temping at about 150 degrees you can see we've just obtained this really beautiful red color the smoke has really adhered and given us this golden beautiful color on the fat and it's not you know so far done that all of the fat is rendered out we're pretty much ready to pull it ideally you'd want to let this slab of bacon chill before cutting into it just so you can get a really clean cut however for the purpose of today's video we're going to go ahead and just slice into it crisp it up it's safe to eat before even crisping it up because we took it to that internal temperature but let's just get it going let's get it in the pan it's nice thick slices in there and i'm so excited look at that beauty all right well that's a great sound yummy yum yum yum [Music] bacon is always a good choice i can't wait going to take a bite from the fattier end all that hard work just watching it cure for a couple days it's crispy succulent and fatty it's got that great salt flavor just a touch of sweetness now i'm ready to like create an infinite amount of dishes worth it all right well that wraps it up for me today if you too want to bring home the bacon check out the link down below in the description check out atvbq.com if you want to see all of the recipes tips and techniques that chef tom and i are creating and if you need to get your own flavors your own cure you need to check out some of the grills and smokers we've got check out atbbq.com all things barbecue where barbecue legends are made

Channel: allthingsbbq

Views: 79,126

Keywords: bacon, chef britt, smokehouse bacon, cured, smoked, charcuterie, pork belly, bbq, atbbq, atbbq.com, all things bbq, lem, cure, jacobsen salt, kosher sea salt, sea salt, brown sugar

Id: 4uJ--GcsyoE

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020