Making bacon

Bacon is a food that gets a lot of attention. Sometimes weird, sometimes good and sometimes bad. All of this despite the fact a surprisingly large part of society does not eat bacon.

Perhaps it is why bacon is relatively cheap and accessible. In order to be cheap and accessible some of the best parts of bacon are lost.

Although the most affordable options do not have the depth and breadth of flavour you can can still buy such great bacon. You must pay a lot for this.

These are your 2 readily available options but a third exists. This third option is slower, requires work and produces something better than the expensive commercial options for much less.

This third option is to make your own bacon.

In order to make bacon you will need time, will, equipment and ingredients.

For this example we used a single piece of pork belly but you could also use loin.

The pork belly was divided into two equal halves so we can show the dry curing method and wet curing method.

Both use 5 percent salt, 5 percent sugar and 0.1 percent black pepper by weight of the pork.

The wet method add these ingredients to the water and makes a brine. The pork is added to this brine in a zip lock bag.

The dry method rubs this mixture into the pork belly. The pork belly is than put in a zip lock bag.

The bacon then rests in the fridge for a week. Each day it is taken out and the the bacon is massaged to reapply the dry rub or shake the brine.

At the end of this the bacon should be firm.

While it is home made the bacon is much better than what you can but. It can be cheaper when done well or if you have the chance to buy bacon belly or loin at a discount.

This method produces a much more flavourful bacon. Not the bad kind of flavourful either. At least with this recipe it is a subtle flavour but you can make which recipe you find suitable and to your taste.