I MADE BACON! BWAHAHAHAHA…

Throw whatever mythology or misconceptions you may have had about curing meat or making your own bacon out the window ’cause brothers and sisters I have done it!  I CREATED BACON!!!

Now in all honesty it’s not that hard.  But I got to tell you, I was really apprehensive about this.  I am not a cook at all.  Can I cook some stuff? Yes.  Will I be on the next episode of “Top Chef”? No.

So anywho, last week I pulled the pork belly out of the fridge after curing for the last 9 days.

It was incredible the amount of liquid that pulled out of the pork.  This brine almost completely covered the belly and was full of salt…some of which you can see along the sides of the dish.

So I washed off the slab in cold water, patted dry and proceeded to immediately cut up some slices to pop in the oven…

Looks like bacon to me…let’s get a closer look…

Since I did not smoke this, it still had a real deep red color to it.  Too bad my camera just doesn’t want to white balance properly in my kitchen or you’d see that.

Time to pop in the oven and walla…

BACON!

But not quite perfect.  It was a good attempt for my first time, but look at the pan…see how dry it is?  It looks like my fears were realized in that I had the butcher trim off too much of the fat before I brought the belly home. What you do see in the pan is salt.  Even though I thought I rinsed the slab well, when these strips cooked up salt just came pouring out of them.

I tried one slice and it was pretty good…but then the salt creeped up and got me.  I had to quickly reach for a bottle of water, it was so overpowering.  After that, each strip got it’s own bath in cold water and from there it was some good eatin’.

The rest of the slab went into the freezer.  I am going to try to smoke that and see if it helps (after another real good drenching in cold water).  For now, I have tomatos, lettuce and for all intensive purposes, bacon! The BLT from Scratch Challenge is almost finished…time to make some bread and mayo this weekend and finally see an end to this season long project.