Makin’ Bacon: Round 1
So who doesn’t love bacon? I know, you can tell me various sub-sets of people who won’t, but truth is, they’re wrong. You either love bacon, or you’re wrong. Simples. I used to order off Cure & Simple, it was a “bacon by post” service and it was good – but sadly, it depended on Royal Mail and too many times the post wouldn’t make it here in time, and then it’d be stuck in a warm sorting office for a weekend, and it’d be ruined by the time it arrived.
Sad times.
It looks like they’ve now disappeared, despite running for years, so I guess too many people had the same experience I did. It was a marvellous idea, and if I could think of any conceivable way I could make it work, I’d have a bash at running something similar myself. But I think, in reality, people would need to buy more in bulk because it’d have to be sent chilled, and it’d cost too much to do that for just 8 rashers.
So then we get onto where to buy the bacon from. Supermarkets, especially Waitrose, do have a selection of ‘nicer’ bacon, and some of it is really very nice – but there’s no variety. The thing I liked about Cure & Simple was you could get different flavour bacons, so that over time you could just mix it up a little. Nothing ridiculous, but stuff like maple glazed, or treacle, or just different types of smoked.
Your local butcher can often have a good range of bacon, and ours (Harrison’s in Leigh) is fantastic, but I do like to do stuff myself… so I got chatting, and asked the butcher what I needed to do.
Then I ignored half his advice.
So for round 1, I asked the butcher to give me the cut of meat I needed. I then got home, and went to Google to find out how to cure bacon. Damn, you need special salts….. nahhh, it’ll be fine.
I Googled around a bit more, found some recipes for a salt mix, and…
Yup, that’s some whisky there. A ton of sea salt (I presume I weighed it but I don’t recall, this was well over a year ago now). Turned it over and…
Now I remember the butcher telling me a few things (as I said, in my ignorance I ignored the advice, because I’m stupid) but one of the most important things was: time.
As soon as I put this in my ‘curing fridge’ (aka the fridge in the utility room) I realised: we were going away 5 days later. “Oh noooo…”
Well, I figured nothing for it but ram as much flavour on it as I can, and hope. But it’s not really going to be cured.
On the penultimate day, I decided to add (I think because I wanted it to be a nice sweet bacon) a load of brown sugar.
Pretty sure I added more salt. I mean, you can hope, right?
Well… a day later I rinsed it off…
And then because I Googled (I haven’t done this subsequently) I wrapped it in muslin for a day.
Finally, it was ready to slice…
Well, it sort of LOOKS like Bacon, right?
I’m actually impressed I got those slices – given that I didn’t do what I do now (which is to partially freeze the meat to make it easier to slice). I suspect many poorly cut rashers were hidden underneath the best ones.
So then we cooked up a quick sandwich to see how it tasted:
Now, it wasn’t “bacon” – but it was tasty. And having the fat rest in the whisky gave it an amazing flavour. It was nowhere near what I wanted it to be, so I made plans to do it again… Round 2, coming soon.
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