It took two days to thaw in the refrigerator (two days longer than my excitement wanted to allow) but when I slapped the 9-pound pork belly on my kitchen counter, it kind of freaked me out. One side was beautiful, a mélange of deep, brick-red meat laced with a profound amount of milky-white pork fat. The other side, though, was the skin, laced with stubbly reminders that pigs have bristles and nubby dots that looked like warts. Warts, in a neat, straight line? Oh, No. Those are nipples.
The easiest solution for that, of course, was to just flip the belly back over. And, honest, my horror was more mother-related than existential slaughter revulsion. I knew that this pig — a sow, I can say with certainty, from Palmetto Creek Farms an hour from my house — was raised humanely and butchered as nicely as any livestock can be. And I was going to transform it into the most profoundly tasty porcine product: bacon, cured by my own hands.
Curing bacon is an incredibly simple process. Take salt and flavorings, apply to pork belly, and you're done. Actually, that's more like Italian pancetta, which is almost as tasty. For standard bacon, you also have to add some smoke to the meat after it's cured. I was using a basic recipe from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's seminal book Charcuterie, a must-read for anyone interested in all forms of pig fat.
Simple, sure, but I encountered a stumbling block before I even started. Most cures call for pink salt, aka curing salt, a combination of regular sodium chloride and sodium nitrite. Pink salt is cheap, but difficult to find except through mail-order websites. Thankfully, I know a guy.
I walked over to Derek's Culinary Casual and borrowed a cup of sugar, er, pink salt from chef Derek Barnes. He cures his own bacon in the restaurant, but doesn't use the sodium nitrite for that — just straight kosher salt. I decided to stick with my recipe.
I mixed the pink salt with regular salt and brown sugar, cut the belly into manageable 2-pound sections, and packed the cure on all sides. Bag it and place in fridge, quick and easy.
The next day, that dry, packed mixture had turned into an unappetizing brown liquid as the salt drew water from the meat. Salt preserves meat by drawing out water and killing microbes, and is one of the reasons why we moved from savagery to civilization. It's magic. Brown magic, apparently.
According to Charcuterie, the flesh should firm up after about a week to show that the salt has done its work. Six days later I poke. Prod. Huh. Doesn't seem any firmer than a week ago, but hey, I'm on a deadline. And I'm hungry.
Too bad. Although curing is easy, you have to have patience. I rinsed and dried the meat, then back into the fridge for another 24 hours.
By this point, it looked like bacon, but unless you cook it the pork is still subject to problems and won't stay fresh nearly as long. You can throw it into a slow oven until the meat hits 140 degrees, but that's not bacon. First thing the next morning, I'm soaking wood chips and lighting the grill.
Two hours bathed in hardwood smoke and 200-degree-Farhenheit heat is enough to turn the exterior a glorious golden brown while leaving the interior fat solid, sweet and smoky. Once off the heat, I slice away the skin and cut bits off the ends of all three slabs. Taste testing. Within an hour I'm sick to my stomach and bloated with salty pork fat. Thankfully, I have 24 hours to recover.
I pop open the fridge at 6 a.m. the next morning like a kid on Christmas morning. First, though, 30 minutes in the freezer makes the fat nice and solid to help with slicing. I cover a giant skillet with the beautiful pieces, slowly bringing the heat to medium. By the time the second batch had started to sizzle, I'd eaten an entire half-pound of bacon, savoring each bite.
It's meatier than store-bought. Salty, but without the chemical tones of supermarket brands. Sweet, but barely. It's fabulous, if I do say so myself, and I suspect that I'd be just as impressed even if I hadn't cured it myself. But I did, which makes it the best damn bacon in the world.
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2009.