Makin’ Bacon: Maple Bacon
So this is the 5th time at least I’ve done this now, and I’m starting to get the hang of it. It is really quite easy, actually, although as per my previous bacon posts, you’ve gotta make sure you get the basics right. So, for Christmas, I’d asked for a boning knife, as I really want to get more into buying the larger cuts of meat, and then butchering it myself to get the cuts exactly how I want them. That’s not to say the butcher wouldn’t do that for me, but it’s also just a skill I want to improve.
So I got a pork belly on the bone, and set about getting the skin off, and then deboning.
I think that was around 3kg, before removing the skin / bone. I forgot to take a pre-photo before removing the bones, but I did one after:
I definitely need to practice this, but also I made life really hard for myself by being relatively impatient. You see, I’d got this when I got the Christmas Meat in from the butchers, but I knew I wouldn’t get around to it until New Year – so it went into the freezer on the day I got it, then I got it out around lunchtime, but by evening it was still frozen solid. I put it in the fridge overnight, then got it out the next day and left it out most of the day, and it was still frozen in places, so it was hard to tell what was bone, and what was just frozen solid meat.
Anyway… ready for salting, I weighed it and added 5% curing salt. It went into the fridge for 5 days, being turned every day. At the end it looked like this:
Now I’d spoken to the butcher, as this time I was going a maple glaze, and last time when I did the glaze I’d done it on a dish, but over the 24 hours more liquid/moisture had come out of the bacon and it had overflowed / made a mess. So this time I thought I’d put it in a bowl or something… but then a valid point from my butcher was it’s hard to control exactly how much will be absorbed evenly into the meat.
He suggested sealing it in a bag with a measured amount of syrup, at which point I realised, I’d got a vacuum sealer for Christmas so I realised I could use that. I hadn’t had a chance to get any large bags in, so I chopped up the bacon into three portions, but then this gave me the idea – I could vary the amount of maple syrup as they were even cuts to see which amount works best.
Each cut of pork belly here weighed about 800g (ish). I used 50ml, 100ml and 150ml of maple syrup in each:
So that then sat in the fridge for 24 hours, before then getting it out, draining it, slicing and vacuum sealing ready for freezing. Out of each pork belly slab I got about 16 rashes plus a nice big chunk of lardons.
I will report back once I’ve actually tried some – the weekend got away from us and I was doing this just before dinner, so haven’t had a chance to cook up even a test slice!! It looks and smells good though, so fingers crossed…! Once all sliced, I portioned and labelled the bags so I’d know which pack had what quantity of maple syrup:
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