Home made bacon

(David Cooke) #1

Hi, before I started Keto I made my own (so called ‘Canadian’)bacon a few times, which involved rubbing the meat not only with salt and herbs but also curing salt (Sodium nitrite) and sugar. So on discovering that the principal purpose of curing salt is to keep the bacon free of bacilli and to give it a pink colour, and of course that sugar is neither necessary nor desirable, I decided to give it another shot. No nitrite …
I took 2 Kg of the best pork cut I could find, and:
1.Put the pork belly (I used pork loin) in a baking pan.
2.Mix together the salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, and crushed red pepper flakes.
Preferably use a mortar and pestle to blend together.
3.Thoroughly rub the pork with the spice blend, garlic… Return to thebaking pan.
4.Place the pork belly in refrigerator uncovered for 5-7 days. Flip the bacon and pour off any
liquid every day. (I only had a little liquid on the first day)
I left it for 10 days as this is what I had done before. Furthermore, I didn’t then bake it in the oven as recommended in the original recipe, the meat was edible uncooked and proved excellent when fried…so no smoking or baking, smoke sounds carcinogenic anyway. The liquid smoke that was also recommended has been found to be equally dangerous.
So there you go, cheaper, healthier bacon, easy.
Anybody else?

(Mike W.) #2

You had me until the last paragraph then got confused. Is it bacon if it’s not smoked? You ate some cured but uncooked pork belly?

(David Cooke) #3

Smoking adds to the (carcinogenic) taste and of course will preserve the meat longer. I m perfectly happy with my ‘bacon’ or whatever you want to call it. Not all bacon is smoked, the addition of something called the repulsive name of ‘liquid smoke’ is often used in your shop bought ‘smoked’ bacon. Cheers.

(Mike W.) #4

Liquid smoke is just water that has been exposed to smoke. It’s not a chemical.