The Best Bacon | Curing Pork Belly & Smoking Sausage

today is gonna be the start of a really cool project for us we are going to be starting the five day process of curing our own bacon we're going to take you guys from start to finish on making bacon from curing it smoking it and putting it away in the freezer right here we have our pork bellies and this is what bacon looks like before you actually cure it and what curing is is a way of using salt to draw moisture out of the meat and preserve it this is going to be our first time curing bacon there's tons of ways you can do this and the route we're going to take is we're gonna do a no nitrate type of cure and we're going to be using kosher salt to do that so let's jump in and get started on making our own bacon the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna cut these pork bellies into more manageable pieces to actually slice them to bacon when this is all done we have 15 pounds of pork belly so that's what we're basing our recipe off of and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to get our wet ingredients for our brine mixed in this bowl so that is going to consist of a half a cup of maple syrup and we're also going to use four tablespoons of red wine vinegar we're going to start mixing our dry ingredients and this is going to be one of the most important parts when you're curing your own bacon and that's going to be the salt ratio there's a lot of different ways you can do this a lot of people use curing salts we're going to be using our kosher salt and the ratio we're going to be using is when you use a quarter cup of this per 5 pounds of meat so in total we're going to need 3/4 cup of this kosher salt now that we have our salt in our bowl we're gonna add our other ingredients and we're going to be using brown sugar we have some fennel seeds tarragon coriander and some black pepper we're going to start with 1 cup of the brown sugar we're going to be doing 2 tablespoons of each of these so we've got our black pepper this is our coriander have our fennel seed and this is tarragon we've got our drying ingredients all mixed up and we're going to jump back to the wet ingredients and I is what we're going to start with we're going to completely coat all four pieces of the pork belly with that and then we're going to move on to rubbing in our dry ingredients let's get started on our dry ingredients and I'm going to use half of this to coat the top and the sides of the meat and then I'm going to use the other half after I flip them over and we're gonna coat the underside you want to really press this into it and make sure that you're gonna coat every single surface on this we've got our pork belly all covered in our cure if you were doing this at home you most likely be putting this in a glass baking dish and you'd be keeping it in your fridge anywhere from three to seven days our situation is a little bit different as we don't have a refrigerator so what we're going to do is we're going to be using this food grade bucket we're gonna put all of our pork belly in here and we're going to be keeping it down in our root cellar for the same amount of time right now our root cellar is sitting at the perfect temperature to be doing this we're at 35 degrees we've done a little research on how long you want to cure this stuff for and we don't like something that's super salty so I think we're gonna just do it the three day mark I'm gonna get the lid on our bucket and put this down in the root cellar all right we are back with our bacon it has actually been four days since we put it down in the root cellar we originally wanted to do three but things came up and we couldn't get to it so we actually ended up with four days on it and I went down there every day and I flipped the meat and it actually was producing quite a bit of liquid you can see in there we now have a bunch of liquid in the bottom so our next step is going to be rinsing this meat off in cold water sitting it on the counter to dry and then we need to hang it now we've got our meat rinsed off we need to Pat it dry and I'm just going to use a clean kitchen towel to do that next step we need to age this meat and if you're doing this at home you're gonna want to have airflow with this so the main goal is to not have this just sitting on a surface like the bottom of a pan you're going to be putting this in your refrigerator you want some sort of rack to lift it up off the bottom of your pan we're going to be putting it out in our shed since it's cold enough that it's not going to freeze the meat and it's not too hot or it's going to spoil it so for us what we're going to do to make sure this gets plenty of airflow so I've got these branches and we're gonna put a piece of meat here and a piece of meat here then I've got another one and we're just going to hang them inside the shed for 24 hours all right since tomorrow we're gonna be firing up the smoker for the bacon we decided we were going to use our last bag of pork trim we're gonna grind it up and we're gonna be smoking some snack sticks and we're going to go for a sweet and spicy recipe and we're gonna be throwing in one of my favorite canned food and that is cowboy candy so the first thing we're gonna do is get this meat all grinded up through the coarse grinder add all of our ingredients and we're going to grind it through one more time through the fine grinder and then we're going to be using our sausage stuffer today this is all partially frozen pork trim and all I'm gonna do is cut this into small enough pieces that it's gonna fit down the neck in our grinder so something like that is already perfect [Applause] [Music] we've got most of our meat grinded up I just have a little bit more at this point I'm going to add all of our ingredients into our grinder and then I'm going to kind of flush it through with the rest of the meat so we're gonna add a can of cowboy candy we're gonna add the liquid and everything I'm gonna add a whole cup of brown sugar and then I've got a bunch of things in here we've got coriander thyme sage and some mustard powder gonna add our salt do a bunch of black pepper [Music] we need to soak these casings in some warm water to be able to stuff them while we're doing that we're going to get our grinder cleaned up and we're also cooking a piece of our sausage to make sure we like the way it tastes sausage turned out great we're just going to leave it like that next step is we are going to get the collagen casing loaded on to the sausages supper and then we're going to load it with our sausage all right guys this is gonna be our sausage we're be smoking so this is just gonna go outside then we're gonna wait till tomorrow and we're gonna get the smoker fired up and smoke our snack sticks and our bacon all right this morning we're getting the smoker cleaned off and we're gonna get a fire lit in there and get her heated up so why this is heating up our next step is we're gonna get our alder that we just cut down yesterday I'm gonna get this cut into chunks and then we're gonna skin the bark off it and this is what we're gonna use to be smoking our meat okay we've got our skin to alder on the smoker we're gonna head in and grab our bacon our sausage [Applause] we got the door on the smoker preferably we want to get this thing to about 150 to 160 degrees I'm not sure how fast we're gonna get there it's really cold outside today but I'm going to stick my thermometer in the side and I'm gonna check back in about 20 minutes and see where we're at I know the bacon is gonna take about two to three hours and the sausage is probably gonna go double that okay guys so the smokin is going pretty good we're sitting at about 175 degrees it's been pretty hard to keep this thing hot today it's only six degrees Fahrenheit outside but this has actually been going for probably about four or five hours and we're getting ready to pull this stuff off so we're gonna get it pulled off and probably about a half an hour and we'll see you guys inside okay guys we made it inside everything turned out really good we did have kind of a change of plans with our snack sticks this is now going to become just smoked sausage we're going to end up cutting these into pieces and freezing them and the reason being for that is I was having a lot of trouble keeping that smoker hot for a long period of time so I wasn't able to smoke these as long as I wanted so they're not gonna be snack sticks we're just gonna freeze them and keep them in the freezer but they still turned out really good and the bacon the bacon is looking awesome I can't wait to slice into it and that is the next thing we're gonna do I'm gonna kind of square it up so we can get some nice good square pieces of bacon okay so as you can tell this bacon looks amazing I can't wait to even try this and then we're gonna take the little misfit pieces the ends and pieces and we're gonna just package those separately something like that here's what we ended up with that's a lot of fake and that's gonna be awesome we're looking forward to cooking some of that up and we're going to cook some tonight we're also gonna cook one of these and we'll let you know how they taste and our next step is I'm going to give these sausages chopped up into about half this size all right that's it all the day's work one more thing to do we are going to fire up the FoodSaver and that's what we're gonna be doing with all these we're gonna be vacuum packed in [Music] [Applause] [Music] alright that was the last bag and we saved just enough to cook up some dinner we weren't going to end this video without telling you how that tasted and it was incredible that was our first time with snack sticks we have done something like that before but not smoked and it was a first time with the bacon and the bacon was incredible it's really good from pigs like that it's thicker it's Meteor even though it has a lot of fat it really just comes out really good melts in your mouth and the snack sticks were great too we thought they were kind of like a spicy summer sausage and you can tell we pretty much ate our stuff very quickly yeah that was amazing I'm gonna say it right now that was the best bacon I've ever had I don't know what what it was it was just really good and the brown sugar came through and its really good and the coolest thing I think about that bacon was that was really easy to make as you saw from the video that's not complicated and you know anyone can do it and we got a ton of bacon we saved a lot of money just making our own absolutely it's something we would totally do again we hope you guys enjoyed this video found it may be useful we are going to get all of this stuff put away now it's just like a summer sausage summer sausage I think it's Soviet that's like better than night there's better than any bacon our happy but sweet the sugar comes out yes this tastes like bacon let's just think the bacon we bought but this one the other one you could tell the fat where the fat was and it was like fatty this like the whole thing just tastes like a really good melt-in-your-mouth morsel oh yeah okay so my second piece is different what is it like like we said melting enough like candy what were you thinking it's a connector for a bird yeah I can eat white just say it again easily yeah is it good on us or no yep

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 342,406

Rating: 4.9492388 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, off grid life, living in alaska, off grid vlog, alaska vlog, cabin life, tiny house alaska, life in alaska, off grid cabin, a day in the life off grid, winter in alaska, off the grid, full time off grid, cabin winter living, pork sausage recipe, curing bacon at home, how to cure bacon, smoking bacon, pork snack sticks, smoking sausage, how to smoke meats, how to smoke bacon, winter cabin living, nitrate free bacon recipe, grinding sausage at home

Id: V_kQoVpTUVI

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 07 2019