I’ve had my pellet smoker a few years now, but I haven’t made bacon. I think it’s time to change that! I’m looking for tips and recipes. Treat me like a new brewer…I know nothing. Keep it as simple as possible. And thanks!
OK, I got you.
Back story: I was a retail butcher for my dad at our family butcher shop in Butte, Montana in high school and college. We made our own bacon in-house (and sausage, hams, …), but I’ve taken bacon to an art form since.
Bad news first: pellet smokers aren’t the best for getting strong smokey character into smoked meats. Pellet smokers have a place in the world (obviously, they’re super popular) - they’re the EasyBake Oven of smokers/grills. You can put a pork shoulder on for 10 hours without having to babysit it, and it won’t get oversmoked or catch on fire or go cold on you. But for smoking bacon, the smoke flavor is going to be underwhelming. It’s still going to be tasty and it’s still worth pursuing, just don’t beat yourself up that it could use more smoke flavor. You can help the cause by using one or two smoke tubes in the pellet smoker, but if you don’t have any (yet), it’s worth getting started even without them. And who knows, maybe it’ll be just the way you like it without the extra hassle.
And any homemade bacon is better than commercial bacon and definitely better than no bacon at all.
Most commercial bacon is “wet cured”, meaning it’s soaked in a brine containing sodium nitrite, salt, sugar, and water, and usually the brine is also pumped into the meat. A lot of commercial bacon is also not smoked at all, but cooked in a steam oven with liquid smoke added to get some smoke flavor in it. This is all to accelerate curing of the meat and shorten processing time, but quality suffers considerably.
What we’re going to make is dry cured bacon, the old fashioned way, which is a much much better product but it takes a week.
So, first thing you’re going to need is pork belly. Visit your local butcher shop and get either a hunk of pork belly or a whole one (whole will be about 10-12 pounds). If they ask whether you want skin on or off, ‘skin off’ is the easy answer. You don’t want the skin on your bacon (it’s too chewy), but if the belly comes with skin and you have knife skills, you can remove it and reserve later to make chicharrones.
The next thing you’ll need is sodium nitrite. That’s the curing agent that makes bacon bacon, that makes ham ham. You might see some cured meat products advertised as ‘uncured’ (‘no added sodium nitrite’), but if you check the ingredients and celery powder is listed instead, that’s just a natural source of sodium nitrite. Sodium nitrite is sold commercially as “Pink Salt #1” or “Prague Powder #1”. The ‘#1’ is important - that product is 6.25% sodium nitrite and the rest is ordinary table salt, colored pink so cooks don’t confuse it with ordinary table salt. (Don’t confuse Pink Salt #1 (sodium nitrite and salt) with Himalayan pink salt. They’re in no way the same.). There’s also a Pink Salt #2, but that’s a combination of sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate, and table salt, and is used for things that are dry-aged for a long time (6 months). We want the Pink Salt #1 version, faster acting for a shorter 1-week dry aging cycle. You can get this on Amazon (or at other retailers) - just look for Pink Curing Salt #1 and avoid any products that have “Himalayan” in the title (that’s not what we want).
Dosing of sodium nitrite should be fairly specific - we don’t want to underdo it (meat won’t cure fully) or overdo it (excess sodium nitrite at some level isn’t healthy). So: weigh your pork belly, and for every pound of meat you’re curing, mix up:
1.134 g pink salt #1 (per pound of meat)
10 g table salt (per pound of meat)
20 g table sugar (per pound of meat)
Mix the dry ingredients by hand in a big bowl. Place your pork belly in a big plastic tub (ideally one that has a lid), then evenly spread the cure mixture all over the pork belly top/bottom/sides. Cover the tub with a lid (if you have one) and refrigerate for 6-7 days. If you don’t have a tub that big, or fridge space that wide, you can cut the belly into sections, stack in a narrower bin, and add the cure making sure to get between all of the pieces. And the ‘fridge’ can be the garage if it’s wintertime and cold outside.
For extra credit, you can open up the bin after a few days, slosh around the liquid (the cure will pull water out of the meat), turn the belly over, and put the lid back on. This is just to make sure all of the meat gets cured, but it’s mostly to satisfy my need to futz with things.
After 6 or 7 days, pull the belly out of the bin. Discard the liquid. You can rinse the curing liquid off of the belly and then pat it dry with towels (the standard advice), or skip the rinsing and just pat dry the belly (the way I do it). Next, you want to air dry the surface of the belly before smoking it (called forming a pellicle). I have bacon hooks made for this. (DM me your address and I’ll mail you some.) Or you can place the belly on a rack supported by soup cans so air can flow all around it. And then place a fan next to it to keep air flowing and dry the surface - this only takes an hour or two in Denver but the air is dry here. You want it to get just dry to the touch and slightly leathery - don’t overdo it.
Now you’re ready to smoke! Place the belly in your smoker, and for a pellet smoker, you’ll probably want the ‘smoke’ setting (185F or so). You want the temperature low and smoke high. Let it smoke for 3 hours (maybe more for a pellet smoker), aiming to raise the internal temperature of the bacon to about 160F (anything above 145F is fine, but getting too high will render the fat away which is not our intention here). The real goal is smoking until the surface if a fine dark amber, but if the internal temperature gets to around 160F before the color is dark, pull it anyway. That’ll be as good as it gets. We don’t want to overcook it.
I have a cheap old electric smoker, and I start it at 185F, ramping to 225F over 3 hours or so, and I replace the ashes with fresh wood chips every half hour or so. After about 3 hours, the meat is dark amber, the internal temperature is around 155-160F, and it’s ready to remove. You’ll have to dial in your own process with the pellet smoker, but it might be ok to leave it on ‘smoke’ the whole time and maybe extend the time to 4 hours (see how the internal temperature is doing).
If you have any choice of wood for the pellets, applewood is my favorite for bacon, but any fruit wood is great (pecan, cherry, …), even hickory. The only wood to avoid is mesquite - mesquite is great for grilling, but it’s too harsh for long smoking like this.
After smoking, let the bacon cool on the counter, cut into roughly 1-1.5 pound chunks, vacuum pack, and freeze some of them. For serving, slice the bacon by hand using a long sharp knife, arrange on a rack in a roasting pan, and cook in an oven on the ‘roast’ setting if you have that (‘convection roast’ even better). Or fry it in a pan if you want, but oven roasting tastes better and you it makes better grease for recovering and using in other cooking.
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After curing and patting dry, hanging on bacon hooks supported with an old curtain rod on two corny kegs with a fan on it.
Smoker in action.
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Doug has you covered. I use TenderQuick as a sub for the cure mixture
Bacon made easy
For slab bacon, buy a pork belly.
For Canadian bacon, buy a pork loin.
Add 1 Tablespoon of TQ for each pound of meat.
Rub it on the meat.
Add brown sugar, and/or spices, if you would like.
Place it in a plastic bag.
Put it in the fridge for 7 days, turning each day.
Day 7, rinse very well in cool water, pat dry, put on a cookie cooling rack, place in the fridge for a day, or at least several hours.
Cool smoke to around 145/F degrees internal.
Slice, fry, and enjoy!
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We’re in good alignment. I think we’re close to a new SOP for bacon.
I should add that I’ve tried lots of exotic sugars and spices in the curing step and have been disappointed that not much (any?) of the flavor carried through to the final product. So now, if I want to do any fancy treatments (Black Forest seasoning, maple sugar, chipotle, …) I’ve taken to adding it when cooking (most flexible, highest flavor impact). Adding it during smoking is an option too.
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Thank you so much, gents!
Great details, thanks. I have a smoker but have never made bacon. Now I think I will.
For the “table salt,” does this need to be non-iodized?
That’s user preference. My taste buds aren’t good enough to pick up the iodine flavor. If you can taste the iodine, and don’t like it, use non-iodized table salt.
On a similar topic, I split the table salt portion above into 1/3 potassium chloride and 2/3 table salt. I do this just to get more potassium in my diet and I can’t pick up the metallic flavor from potassium at this level, but that’s my own particular weirdness.
I’ve tested on myself and I can definitely detect a harsh bitterness with iodized I don’t get with non iodized.