This is not what bacon should look like, just coming off the smoke. This is what bacon looks like when you figure all is going smoothly, and head out with the family shopping for groceries. And instead of coming home to the anticipated wisp of smoke that needs tending, coming home to a huge grease fire in your smoking apparatus. … Read More
Mmm, smoke – I could almost eat my jacket
I’ve posted often enough about bacon to skip the details. Short story: the last batch was awesome, and it’s all gone. So out came another slab of belly. And what’s this…hog jowl? Hm. And is that a pack of calf moose belly? After a week of curing, they were smoked with apple and hickory. Man, I love hickory. For some … Read More
Apple-wood-smoked Berkshire Bacon
Charcuterie item #1 from my Berkshire hog is in the bag: Bacon. Apple-wood smoked bacon, to be precise. Perhaps of all my bacon-achievements, this is my proudest. It was my first smoking in my new yard, with apple pruned from my very apple tree, smoking pork that a friend and I butchered with our very own hands, from a pig … Read More
Bacon
I have Michael Ruhlman to thank for getting me making bacon at home. I will forever be indebted. I also must thank Gracianne, Maryann, and Yen for prodding me to post about it. It’s been a long time coming. Yen had wanted to get his hands dirty and learn how I did it, so with Ruhlman’s recipe in hand for … Read More
Bacon
I smoked about 7 lbs of bacon today. I must say that starting a fire with dried sage branches from your garden, and tending to a charcoal fire at dawn is a very pleasant experience. The result this time was fantastic. I’d get into more about how this is done, but I lack the time. Another time. I have to … Read More
Smoking Bacon
I had a bit of a breakthrough in my food-smoking technique today. I used to start my fires by lighting the hardwood charcoal with the propane flame. Today, I pulled out my inner boyscout and figured I’d just build a fire as one normally would, and build my charcoal fire on the heat of the wood coals. I had some … Read More
Maple Bacon
I just washed down from curing 3 nice slabs of pork belly. I showed up at my source for said hunks of loveliness, and they had hogs quartered lengthwise, a few of them, laid out on the counter. The butcher eventually broke from his conversation, in chinese, long enough to help me, the lone customer checking out his case. I … Read More
Bacon and Venison
I smoked bacon in -24 and snow today. Far more enjoyable in the fall, but seems to have worked okay nonetheless. Cured pork belly is not near as good as its smoked counterpart. It’s not just the smoke – in this case, hickory. It’s a texture thing too – it firms it up, changes the character of the meat, and … Read More
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