making bacon wtih cure or rub
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I just completed curing two pork bellies into bacon using the injection method described here by Walton’s. You mix Walton’s Maple flavored bacon cure, bacon enhancer, and water. Inject into the bellies and then cover the bellies overnight with a diluted solution of the cure. Next morning, smoke for four hours using apple wood. Let the bellies bloom for an hour or two, then freeze. When almost frozen I sliced them up with my food slicer, packaged into vacuum bags, labeled, and back to the freezer. My recovery of finished bacon was about 77% of the green weight of the two bellies.
As compared to rubbing the pork with a dry rub, injection is days faster. Dry rub requires refrigeration of the bellies for five or six days, turning the pork daily. The bacon produced by injection–do the math to get the amount of cure and water correct for the weight of your pork–is excellent. It has a mild maple smoked flavor that my family likes much better than the sometimes salty taste of rubbed bacon.
The biggest factor, especially this time of year, is that my wife will tolerate my take-over of part of her refrigerator for a day, but if I loaded two meat lugs full of pork bellies in to the refer for a week, I’d hear about it. Can’t screw up her Holiday cooking plans. Just a word to the wise; happy wife, happy life.
Greg -
bromeat what gerygaub says is true, injection is absolutely faster though it requires an injector where rubbing it only requires the cure and a meat lug (or another container).
Bacon Taste Booster is something that is made to help fight off rancidity in the cooler and to help impart the old world taste with modern methods, like injecting. Now, it is most effective when you are tumbling as generally after tumbling you go right to the smoker instead of holding overnight but it can be used when injecting and holding overnight. So you might want to consider adding some if you inject, I add it when I inject and I do think that it adds something nice to the bacon!
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