Uncured Bacon?

[Bruce]

OK, I'll get 40,000 pounds of pork belly and a quality slicer and see how much volume of "uncured" bacon it makes.

 

[Simpleterrier]

@AClark I'm interested in your recipe for your salt brine and smoking instructions

 

[AClark]

For a 1-2 lb pork belly -
I fill a big pot full of water (I think it's like a 2 gallon pot - basically size of a canning pot) - look I don't do measurements here so bare with me. I then add kosher salt, 1 cup per approximate gallon- I taste test it, when it makes your face pucker you have enough salt. I've used that Himalayan pink salt before too. I'll also add in 1/2 cup sugar per gallon. I don't add anything else at this point. I let this soak and check it daily - refrigerated, when the water looks nasty/bloody, I change it out with the same ratio. This is for a week.
Then I put a rub on it, depending on the flavor I want this varies. I don't usually like bacon sweet so I'll put steak seasoning on it. It's a mixture of a wet and dry cure. Once I put whatever I'm going to put on it, I wrap it in saran wrap and back in the fridge for 3-4 more days.

Smoking, I'm still perfecting smoking. I try to keep it around 150-175 degrees. Right now I have pecan wood so that's what I'm using. I have a digital meat thermometer with an alert on it, when it reaches internal temp of 160 I can turn it off and let it rest until I can handle it. I basically have to just keep an eye on the smoker and adjust as I go, sometimes it gets hotter by accident, but it's not a huge deal. It can be hard to regulate it when using wood but I try pretty hard to keep it down. Usually takes 3-4 hours to hit the temps I want. It isn't a big deal if you only hit 150 degrees because it's not like you're going to eat it as is, you cook it after. If you get it too hot in the smoker and "cook" it, it renders off a lot of the fat, and uhm, it's bacon, it needs fat on it!
That's why I cook my brisket at 250 but bacon at 150, I don't mind rendering fat off the brisket to a degree because I don't trim them.

 

[greybeard]

Kinda on topic, I see the Chinese have developed a close-to fat free hog in an effort to allow swine to be able to regulate their internal body temperatures and endure cold weather better. It won't see the light of day in this country and most others because it's genetic manipulation (CRISPR), but it's an interesting concept. Bacon with 24% less fat? I dunno about all that, I don't even eat bacon.

(Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which are the hallmark of a bacterial defense system that forms the basis for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology.)

 

[Simpleterrier]

Thanks that is interesting

 

[AClark]

Kinda on topic, I see the Chinese have developed a close-to fat free hog in an effort to allow swine to be able to regulate their internal body temperatures and endure cold weather better. It won't see the light of day in this country and most others because it's genetic manipulation (CRISPR), but it's an interesting concept. Bacon with 24% less fat? I dunno about all that, I don't even eat bacon.

(Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which are the hallmark of a bacterial defense system that forms the basis for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology.)

Lord, what next? That must be a sin to make delicious real bacon that much less fatty. That's the whole point of bacon, it has fat on it and it is satisfying to eat it.

 

[greybeard]

Lord, what next? That must be a sin to make delicious real bacon that much less fatty. That's the whole point of bacon, it has fat on it and it is satisfying to eat it.

And...they used a different species genome in order to accomplish this...it was from ...
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a mouse.

 

[farmerjan]

YUCK.....

 

[greybeard]

Here's the article:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt...ists-create-genetically-modified-low-fat-pigs

 

[OneFineAcre]

We developed leaner pork many years ago for the Asian market without crossing with mice.
How we did it ?
Slaughtered at 225 lbs instead of 325 lbs