I know, it’s just bacon and eggs. But last night, it wasn’t just any bacon with eggs, it was my, SBA’s, bacon with eggs and tomato – now do you understand…
While I’ve always wanted to try to make my own bacon, I was a little wary and thought it would be terribly difficult! That was until I come across the post of fellow blogger “The Old Fat Guy” from the Canadian Rockies… He showed the way to curing and smoking your own bacon, and I couldn’t wait. While I was unable to procure a piece of pork loin from my favourite supplier, Coltish Pork, I managed to get a nice piece from a butcher that I know provides good quality meat.
The first thing was to trim up the meat, weigh it, calculate the brining period, then weigh out the cure ingredients, massage them in, then pop it all into a snap-lock bag in the fridge for (in this case) 10 days. Each day I turned it and gave it a little massage, just to make sure the cure was getting to each and every little bit of it. Then the big day come, it was removed from the fridge, taken from the bag, washed, given a little soak and then set un-covered in the fridge until the next day. The cold smoker was lit and the meat was set in place to cold smoke for 6 hours before being put back in the fridge. The following day, the hot smoker was set and in went the pork, along with a few other bits and pieces, and all were smoked accordingly.
The, what was now, bacon was covered and placed back in the fridge for another two days, and yesterday was the big day…
The bacon was sliced and several pieces set aside for our dinner last night – yes, that’s right, dinner, not brekky, dinner, and oh my gosh, it was amazing, delicious, what can I say. The rest of the bacon was vac sealed into small serving sizes and then frozen for another day.
While I have posted the recipe here on my blog, I urge you to go and see The Old Fat Guys’ blog where he provides a lot of insight into the making of bacon with this dry cure and has some fantastic pics of the various stages along the way. He has some amazing posts and recipes too, so you may find me referring you there again in the future. I do find it a little amusing that a Slightly Bent Aunt from Australia is referring you to The Old Fat Guy in Canada, don’t you?
So what else was in the smoker, you ask…
I wanted to make sure I put the space to good use, so had brined three large pork hocks, three potatoes and two sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes will be used later this week for a smokey sweet potato smash, and the ordinary potatoes were turned into a delicious creamy smoked potato soup topped with a little truffle oil, fine shavings of parmesan and just to gild the lily, a few shavings of black truffle – we had that for our “Soup and Sweets” night the sweets (dessert) was my Spiced Honey and Yoghurt Panna Cotta topped with vanilla poached peaches and toasted coconut flakes.
Here ends another frantic but fun few days in “Tranquility”….
Links:
“Lunch in Paris” by Elizabeth Band. Elizabeth is an American Journalist based in France and she writes the story of how she went out to lunch with a Frenchman, fell in love and ended up living in Paris. I love this book so much, that I have two copies! Earlier this year when my mother was visiting I wanted to make Chocolate Fondant for her birthday dinner, but horror, we could not find either copy of the book anywhere! Both my husband and I scoured the piles of books (at that stage we didn’t have our bookcases) but to no avail. So there was no Chocolate Fondant, just Nana’s Chocolate Cream Cake for the occasion. Not long after both copies came home – I had leant one copy to each of my sisters!
