Real Self-Energy: Making back bacon

As a French citizen I should probably disavow the following post and remind myself that I have access to some of the best food in the world. Yet it's impossible to forget the tastes of your childhood. And indeed there are lots of British things that are difficult or very expensive to get hold of in France. Some of them (Marmite, Branston pickle ...) I can import via occasional trips across the channel, or in the luggage of visiting relatives. However, since Brexit this no longer works for fresh food like bacon and sausages. This is probably a good thing for my health, but every now and then I get a hankering for a fry-up or a bacon butty, and as a result of their rarity these are amongst the favourite breakfasts of my kids too. So I've learnt how to make bacon and sausages (it turns out that boudin noir is excellent with a fry-up and I even prefer it to black pudding).

Sausages are fairly labour-intensive, but after about an hour or so's work it's possible to make one or two kilos worth. Back bacon, on the other hand, takes three weeks to make one batch, and I thought I'd share the process here.

1. Cut of meat

The first thing is to get the right piece of pork, since animals are divided up differently in different countries. I've made bacon several times now and keep forgetting which instructions I previously gave to the butcher at my local Grand Frais ... Now I have settled on asking for a carré de porc, and when they (nearly always) tell me that they don't have that in I ask for côtes de porc première in one whole piece, and try to get them to give me a couple of kilos. As you can find on wikipedia, I need the same piece of meat used to make pork chops. I then ask them to remove the spine, but it should still have the ribs. So I start with this:

2. Cure

Next the meat has to be cured for 10 days (I essentially follow the River Cottage recipe). I mix up a 50-50 batch of PDV salt and brown sugar (1 kg in total here), and add some pepper, juniper berries and bay leaves:

Notice that this doesn't include any nitrites or nitrates. I have found that nitrates/nitrites are essential for the flavour in sausages, but in bacon the only thing that they will do (other than be a carcinogen) as far as I can tell is make the meat stay pink when you cook it. I can live without that. This cure makes delicious bacon as far as I'm concerned.

The curing process involves applying 1/10th of the mixture each day for ten days and draining off the liquid produced at each step. After the first coating it looks like this:

The salt and sugar remove water from the meat, and penetrate into it, preserving it. Each day I get liquid at the bottom, which I drain off and apply the next cure. After one day it looks like this:

This time I still had liquid after 10 days:

3. Drying

After ten days, I wash/wipe off the cure and pat it down with some vinegar. If you leave cure on the meat it will be much too salty (and, to be honest, this cure always gives quite salty bacon). So at this point it looks like this:

I then cover the container with a muslin that has been doused with a bit more vinegar, and leave in the fridge (at first) and then in the garage (since it's nice and cold this time of year) for ten days or so. This part removes extra moisture. It's possible that there will be small amounts of white mould that appear during this stage, but these are totally benign: you only have to worry if it starts to smell or you get blue/black mould, but this never happened to me so far.

4. Smoking

After the curing/drying, the bacon is ready to eat and should in principle keep almost indefinitely. However, I prefer smoked bacon, so I cold smoke it. This involves sticking it in a smoker (essentially just a box where you can suspend the meat above some smouldering sawdust) for several hours:

The sawdust is beech wood and slowly burns round in the little spiral device you can see above. Of course, I close the smoker up and usually put it in the shed to protect against the elements: