Makin’ Bacon: The home-cured local pork belly experiment
(This piece comes from CL Sarasota’s Summer of Pig coverage.)
It took two days to thaw in the refrigerator — two days longer than my excitement wanted to allow — but when I slapped the nine pound pork belly on my kitchen counter, it kind of freaked me out. A little. One side was beautiful, a melange of deep, brick-red meat laced with a profound amount of milky-white pork fat. The other side, though, was the skin, laced with stubbly reminders that pigs have bristles and nubby dots that looked like warts. Warts, in a neat, straight line? Oh, no. Those are nipples.
The easiest cure for that, of course, was to just flip the belly back over. And honestly, my horror was more mother-related than related to existential slaughter revulsion. I knew that this pig — a sow, I can say with certainty, from Palmetto Creek Farms an hour from my house — was raised humanely and butchered as nicely as any livestock can be. And I was going to grace it with the most profoundly tasty preparation that a pig can undergo: bacon, cured by my own hands.
Curing bacon is an incredibly simple process. Read the rest of this entry »
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