Cold Smoked Bacon

SirSquatch · December 2016

This is my first time making bacon this way in my Big Green Egg, so if it goes horribly wrong, well then it is what it is.

I got a good looking 11.5# pork belly from Costco and split it in two for easier handling. Using the Cure calculator I figured out the amount of Cure #1, salt and sugar to use as a baseline. I ended up trying two different styles. First I used just honey, salt and cure. The other slab I used regular sugar, salt, pepper and cure. I wanted to see if there was any flavor difference with the addition of pepper and if honey made a noticeable difference as well.

http://www.diggingdogfarm.com/page2.html

After getting everything trimmed up and measured out I put the bellies in Food Saver bags, put on the respective rubs (making sure all the cure stayed in the bags), labeled and then sealed.

These sat in the fridge for 13 days. I only went this long (I planned to pull them at 11 day) due to a sick child and just not having the time to make the next step.

After 13 days I pulled them out, rinsed them off and did a fry test (no picture, sorry). I ended up soaking both bellies for an hour to bring the saltiness down a bit.

I put them on a wire rack over a cookie sheet (and took up the entire bottom of our fridge, my wife is good to me!) for 2 days. I once again went longer than I planned, was only going to do it for 24 hours but we had a nice little "heat wave" come through that pushed the outside temperatures above where I wanted to cold smoke.

My A-Maze-N Pellet smoker at the bottom of the LBGE with Cherry pellets (which are really cherry/oak)

This is where I ran into my first "I didn't plan this as well I thought" moments. The slabs were bigger than the real estate on my Egg! This took some moving around, but I checked and rotated them on a regular basis so hopefully I got even-enough smoking on both pieces. I will need to get myself a second gate. Oh. Darn.

I ended up doing three 10 hour smokes (that's about as long of a burn as I get from the AMNPS, give or take 30min)

Various attempts over the course of the smoke to get good coverage, this was as I started my second 10 hour run.

Finally just jammed them together for my last run.

After the final smoked I pulled them off and put them in Food Saver bags and sealed. These are going to rest probably for 2 weeks until I can get my slicer back and get them cut up and frozen. I've seen many people who go from the smoker, back to the wire rack and let them rest uncovered in the fridge but I just don't have the time with the holidays for that.

Thanks for looking, I'll update again once I can slice and get a final taste test.

blind99 · December 2016

Very nice work!

nolaegghead · December 2016

Looks like you're doing it right. I've never cold smoked that long, but that's par for the course in smoke houses. I usually fresh water soak a bit longer.

One comment - if you're going to use your grate to hold the meat, blast it with a weed torch or put in oven or something. The gluck on the grate can get rancid and be a petri dish. The bacon is cured, but you still want to follow good food safety rules. You probably already thought of this, so this is for whoever plans the same technique and reads this, which I see very often on this forum.

Well done. Let us know how it tastes.

Focker · December 2016

Nice post, and color, on your bacon..
I have been doing two twelve hour(approx) cold smokes on bacon, could easily go more. It would be hard to oversmoke a belly IMO.

hondabbq · December 2016

I only cold smoke bacon but I do it on a larger scale so it won't fit on the BGE.
Pit is preferred from what I have read to do multiple smokes with a day's rest in between. Around here we don't like it to heavily smoked so 1 run is enough for us. Usually about 12 hours or 1 run of a full AMNPS

SirSquatch · December 2016

nolaegghead said:

One comment - if you're going to use your grate to hold the meat, blast it with a weed torch or put in oven or something. The gluck on the grate can get rancid and be a petri dish. The bacon is cured, but you still want to follow good food safety rules. You probably already thought of this, so this is for whoever plans the same technique and reads this, which I see very often on this forum.

Well done. Let us know how it tastes.

Good Point! I had wiped the grate down and washed it off but I still got some soot/discoloration onto the bacon, I'll burn it off next time and hopefully knock that out.

blind99 · December 2016

meant to ask - how did you like the saltiness? did you use the calculator's default values (2% salt, 1% sugar)?

SirSquatch · December 2016

blind99 said:

meant to ask - how did you like the saltiness? did you use the calculator's default values (2% salt, 1% sugar)?

I did use the default settings on 1, I didn't really measure out the honey but used 2% salt for both. It was slightly salty before smoking, which is why I soaked for an hour. It didn't need much, just a bit to cut the salt edge.

blind99 · December 2016

I do my cure a little differently, but find the 2% / 1% suits our tastes well. I haven't done the cure in a vacuum bag, I'll have to try that.

SirSquatch · December 2016

Finally got a chance to start slicing these up. I was a bit worried as we fried up a few test pieces that I had over smoked the bacon, but the taste was spot on for what we were looking for. Wife asked for cracked pepper version next, so that's a good sign.

JacksDad · December 2016

Beautiful! Making my own bacon is my favorite thing since getting my egg, and you don't even need an egg to do it. I blame this forum for taking me down a long (and expensive, but tasty) path!

Cold Smoked Bacon

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