Curing bacon is one of those things I've always wanted to try but never got round to.
After
the pig butchery weekend I decided it was time to take some of that lovely Berkshire pig to the next level and make bacon!
I chose three joints that I thought would make nice streaky and back bacon.
I made things a little harder for myself by making my own cure, I brought the salt, saltpeter and brown sugar to do the mix.
Unfortunately the book I have only has imperial measurements in and my brain wasn't working well that night so I was really struggling to work out how much cure I needed per lb of meat! I got there in the end but metric or cup measures are so much easier! Funny because I'll quite happily use feet and inches for measurements.
I made a salt brine to start with to clean the meat.
The Joints only floating in this for ten minutes then dried off on some chopping boards.
I then got the salt cure ready and weighed out enough for each joint.
The joints with the cure rubbed all over then get placed in a freezer bag in the fridge. I think it could have happily gone just in the shed to be honest as it was plenty cool enough when I did it.
After five days these came out, got washed off and then got hung in the shed for a couple of weeks to let the cure penetrate further in.
I tried them with some trepidation.
I'd always heard that home cured bacon was far too salty and horrible. Not this though! This was lovely, it certainly had a more meaty taste than we've had for a while and there is a fair amount of fat on it as well (as you can see in the picture!) but it fried up a treat!
So far we've eaten one and a half of the bacon joints. They've only been in the fridge for five days, whilst in the bags curing, and the rest of the time just hanging there with no refrigeration, well over a month old now from when they were butchered out of the pig.
We're so dependant on our fridges and freezers I find it amazing to have meat out like this and it still be completely edible after this time. No dates on this meat, just my senses to tell me if it's okay or not.
Skills like this are useful to learn for off grid living and food preservation is one of the key skills to self sufficiency. I think to read about it is fine but it's far better to put it into practice. I'll be doing this again even if I have to buy belly pork to do it with, I've also been reading about lamb bacon....
Anyone else cure their own meat?
Have any recipes you think I should try?
