Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Bacon is relatively expensive here and none of it is truly smoked. So I made some a couple of times. The first time was with a wet cure and finished in my kitchen oven. Yesterday I smoked some on my Weber/Smokenator setup. I did a dry cure with honey and brown sugar to give it the sweeter note my wife wanted. It cured for 6 days in my fridge, then was rinsed, dried off, and put back in the fridge overnight to form what they call a pellicle. That is a sort of coating that protects the bacon and grabs the smokey flavor.

I smoked it at 110F to 135F with just a few lit lumps of charcoal and some foil wrapped hickory shavings. After six hours of keeping the charcoal going without getting too hot and replenishing the hickory as necessary, we pulled it off, cooled it and then chilled it in the freezer for slicing. I was a bit worried because, reputedly, dry cured bacon will often be quite salty.

We sliced and cooked a test piece. It was perfect, sweet notes, a slight salty taste but not at all bad, and the wonderful smokey flavor. My wife was very pleased with it. So was I.

Here is a photo of the brother-in-law slicing while I grabbed the camera:

Ruhlman's recipes have you smoke at 225 or so to a 150F final temperature. I wonder how the lower temperature compares?

While I don't have a copy of Charcuterie yet, a friend from another forum sent me a recipe from it which is what I adapted to this set up. I had done a 210F oven-finished bacon a couple of weeks ago as my entry into bacon making. I finished it to an internal temperature of 152F and the bacon was fine.

My wife wanted a sweeter bacon though and I wanted a smokier one. So I took Ruhlman's recipe that called for maple syrup and used honey instead. That substitution worked nicely. But a lot of bacon is cold smoked so it can take more of the smoke flavor. I couldn't do a true "cold" smoke on the Weber which would have been at or below 100F. Running slightly over that into the 110F to 135F didn't present any problem. The lower temperature is so it will have more time to smoke and not overcook. Which allowed it to take on a much smokier flavor than if I had run the Weber at 200F or so and the bacon finished in a couple of hours. I am sure even with two hours of smoke in a hotter environment, it would get some hickory flavor but likely not as much.

If I get to where I make much of this, I will fabricate a cold smoke setup that takes the heat out of the equation so I won't have to balance the charcoal and wood quite so attentively.