Bacon: When to trim the skin?

[bob the noob]

So the last two times I've made bacon, I left the skin on when curing/smoking, then trimmed off before slicing.

In the interest of getting some posting going on I thought I'd throw the question out there: At what stage of the bacon making process do you trim the pork skin off?

Before curing? Before smoking? Before slicing?

 

[bbq bubba]

Remove the skin before curing, promotes a better cure.

 

[cowgirl]

I remove the skin before curing too.

 

[ol' smokey]

Skin prior to smoking is the way to go. Why smoke the skin only to throw it away and lose all that smoke flavor. I personally leave the skin on throughout the whole process, makes less waste.

 

[lcruzen]

Before curing here.

 

[Dutch]

We used to stitch pump then soak our bacon. The bellys that came in with the skin on was cure and smoked that way. We would then peel the rind off, roll it, wrap it and give it back to the customer. If the customer didn't want the rind, we would take it, cut the rind into 2inX4in strips and then deep fry em for some smokey pork rinds.

Going to throw a questing out there-no meaning to hijack Bobs thread-but does anyone still scald and scrap their hogs at slaughter time or do you skin it? When we ran the slaughter truck, we skinned the hogs only because we weren't setup for scalding and scraping.

 

[curious aardvark]

skin first - think about it. You don't eat the skin attached to the bacon. So why weigh it and add the weight of the skin to the total and use more cure than you need.
Also trim to the level of fat you want - same thing fat doesn't cure and actually slows down the curing process.

As for dutch's question (whhooosssssshh - sound of it going straight over my head ;-)