How to: Cure Your Own Bacon

I'm so excited to share this guest post with you! I'm even more excited to get back to my kitchen in the city and try it myself! Meet Erica, a fellow China expat....she's the mastermind behind this. Enjoy! 

How to: Cure Your Own Bacon
The idea of curing meat sounded overwhelming to me, until Sara Beth's confident post on how to cure a ham.  I decided that I could do it and gave it a try.  Another friend of mine had also recently tried it and was sweet enough to let me use some curing salt while I gave it my first attempt.  I was instantly hooked.  I could take a rather inexpensive chunk of meat from my next door wet market and turn it into a beautiful, delicious ham.  

So of course I had to see what else I could do with my (borrowed) curing salt.  And I settled on trying to cure my own bacon.

This is also an easy thing to do in China, as the cut of meat "wu hua rou  五花肉" is a popular cut.  I learned you just have to search for the least fatty cut they have, and ask the butcher to remove the skin and any extra fat they can.

I cut the meat to the desired length.  My goal was to cut just enough off that it would just fit in a large ziploc bag.

Then came time to rub on the salt.  This is called a dry rub, and is a slightly different method than the water/salt/sugar brine that the ham uses.

Ingredients: 

3-5 lbs wu hua rou (pork belly)

1/4 cup salt

1tsp curing salt

1/2 cup honey, syrup, or brown sugar (but I didn't quite use it all)

First you rub on the curing salt, then the regular salt, then you can either use sugar or honey… and I went honey.  It just sounded delicious… honey cured bacon.

My daughter helped me take the picture of me rubbing the meat.  Gotta love the kitchen help!

I did read that you can mix those 3 ingredients ahead of time, therefore only having to rub the meat once.  I will try that next time.  The main thing is that you cover every bit of the meat well.

Once that is done, carefully slide the meat into a ziploc bag and seal up.  I double bagged mine as I just didn't want to have to clean up any leaks!  Place it in the refrigerator to cure. 

Every other day I moved the bag a little, either flipping it over or just moving it with my hand.  As it sat, the juices started to collect.

Wait a week.  It is hard, but necessary.  Remove the bacon from the bag and place in some fresh water to get some salt off.  I soaked mine for about 20-30 minutes. 

Then remove the bacon and slice as thin as you can.  I actually just sliced mine by hand. 

I now own a meat slicer, but have not yet used it on the bacon.  I am eager to try though.  When sliced by hand it came out much thicker than grocery store bacon, I kind of considered it a country style bacon!

I put half of it in the pan and cooked it… I had to keep the temperature low to allow enough of the fat to cook off.

It turned out great.  Quite delicious.  My tribe kept coming into the kitchen to see what was cooking and asking for bite after bite.

The next day I put the rest of it in the oven, my typical go to method for cooking bacon these days.  I allowed it to bake slowly, around 350º (but play around with the temperature as my oven is wacky).  

And it came out just right for me!  I love my bacon crunchy, and so I took those pieces!  

It was quite the hit and I will definitely make this again soon!