ghoti_mhic_uait

Judith and I recently took up Country Skill's Big Bacon Challenge. I'd been intrigued by the idea ever since she first talked about making bacon, and this was all the encouragement I needed.

I sent the husband off to buy pork, where he encountered an enthusiastic butcher, and away we went.

This was the first time I've used my kitchen scales to weigh food (Colin and Benedict do weighing, I use them for yarn), so that was a thing. I weighed the first lot quite carefully, but I get the impression that bacon is quite forgiving and I could get away with experimenting with ratios. Also that it's going to be quite easy to eyeball the cure once I get used to making bacon.

This is my bacon on the second day of curing:

It looks quite shiny because of the bad lighting in my kitchen, but it was starting to turn brown and look more like bacon and less like pork.

Every day there was some change, Judith spent a couple of minutes on the rub and I supervised. Apart from the measuring, Judith did all the work, and by day two she knew what to do.

Here is the bacon the last day before resting:

by this point it's so like bacon that it is annoying to have to wait for it to rest, but I can well believe that it's much better for allowing a day for the flavours to permeate and the edges to get less salty.

We got two lots of sandwiches for the four of us and lardons for a further meal for the four of us out of our 600g pork joint. C and I loved it, B prefers shop bacon, and J just wanted to start making it again. It was salty (but not too salty), sweet and very bacony. The lardons were even saltier and sweeter because they came from the outside parts where the rub had actually been applied.