Excellent Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Divide the hog and cut out the chine if large.
Leave the spareribs in to prevent rust.
Cure
Salt the bacon for 6 days, then drain it from the first pickle.
Mix the salts and sugar, rub them well into the bacon, and turn it every day for a month.
Finish
Drain and smoke for a few days or dry by hanging in the kitchen, away from the fire.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Hog
- The meat being cured, which becomes the bacon and supplies its texture and flavour.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and preserves it while the cure penetrates.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the cured meat and gives it its characteristic pink colour.
- Coarse sugar
- Softens the sharpness of the salt and adds sweetness that balances the cure.
The step that matters
Rubbing the salts and sugar in and turning the bacon daily. The cure only preserves meat where it actually reaches, so the mix must be rubbed in thoroughly and the pieces turned regularly. Uneven coverage lets some areas stay under-cured and vulnerable to spoilage.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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