Bacon Again - 2016.05.21

After a morning of yard work it was time to get the 10 lb pork belly I picked up at Costco a couple of days ago started in the curing process.  This represents 60 lbs of bacon cured this calendar year.
 The recipe this time, very similar to other times but less white granulated sugar since I ran out.

Recipe:

• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cut white granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup kosher salt
• 1-1/2 tsp pink curing salt
• 1/2 cup coarse Malabar pepper

Prep:

I combined all of the ingredients above in a medium size stainless steel mixing bowl.  I used a wide spaced whisk to evenly and thorough incorporate the ingredients together.  The pork belly's from Costco are nicely vacuum sealed in heavy plastic.  I placed the entire package on a large cooking sheet pan.  I sliced open the packaged and slid the pork out of the package and onto the sheet pan.  I examined the meat and removed any layers of connective tissue from the meat.  I look for any large sections of fat that can be easily trimmed without changing the character of the bacon.  I didn't find any this go around.  I separated the pork belly into 3 roughly equal pieces and put each into a separate 1 gallon storage bags.  Into each bag I put 1/3rd cup of the curing mixture on top of the pork.  I spread the rub around the surface of the meat.  I repeated this step on the other side of the meat and then distributed the cure that remained evenly among the 3 bags.  The rub gets in the groove of the zipper of the bag so I run my fingers along the zipper to remove as much of the granular cure as I can.  Then I sealed each bag and placed it into another equal size storage bag and sealed them all.  All 3 of the bags of pork where placed in our garage refrigerator.  Each day, for 6 or 7 days, the bags will be turned over in the refrigerator.  After a couple of days, there will be lots of fluid released from the pork in the curing bags.  This is part of the curing process and why the bag needs to be rotated daily to distribute the cure ingredients.

My hope is that this batch will feature a little more of the pepper flavor in the finished product.

The Smoking:

This morning (2016.05.28) I fired up the Green Mountain Grill - Daniel Boone - and updated the firmware to the latest available.  The procedure was pretty easy and went without any issue.  I always forget to connect my Android phone via wifi directly to the grill.  This is required to get it initialized correctly for the update.  After that I went through a warm-up cycle to help establish a consistent cool 150 degree temperature for the bacon to smoke in. 

I put the 3 slabs of bacon on the grill and it stayed consistently low in temperature - 150 - for the first couple of hours.  I opened the pellet hopper and added some fruit wood pellets and shortly after that the temperature went up to 202.  Something about changing the air flow increased the temperature.  It's now starting to settle back down.

Results:

2016.05.28 - 11:40PM
The three slabs of pork belly came off the grill after 7-8 hours.  They reached an internal temperature of 150 degrees Fahrenheit.  They look very good.  Top coating is nicely caramelized.    The fat side, down in the smoker, is nicely solidified.  Each slab is in a separator gallon storage bag in the refrigerator. We will have a few slices with breakfast in the morning.