Buckboard Bacon!!!
I've been making bacon with the dry method in a vacuum bag using pork belly and it's turned out well. I live in a small town in Nebraska though and pork bellies are hard to find as the grocery stores don't normally carry it and the only butcher shop doesn't either, though he can order it, ordering is a little expensive though.
Pork butts are readily available though and go on sale often, so I decided to give Buckboard Bacon a try. I was wondering what it would taste like. We do occasionally custom slaughter a pig and we've had the locker make Cottage Bacon. It was good, but was more pork/ham than bacon tasting.
I cut the bone out, cut it in half and squared the chunks up, but that was all the trimming I did. I went with the same formula I use for pork belly - 2% uniodized salt (I used the finer, table salt sized grain stuff I had left over from making Pop's Breakfast sausage), .75% plain white table sugar (I'm border line diabetic so bumped this down to the low end and actually like it better lower, plus earlier when I used 1% I used brown sugar and I had some sticking while frying issues. I may bump this lower to see if it makes any difference to me), and the mandatory .25% cure #1.
We sealed it up in a vac bag and left it in the fridge, flipping it every day, for three weeks. Usually I go two, but we caught COVID and I just wasn't up to dealing with it at the time. By the time we were over COVID the weather had turned from mild to scorching, so I skipped the smoking step.
Gave it a fry and...it is BACON!!! NO pork or ham taste, it's definitely bacon through and through! It's delicious! The only difference between it and the belly bacon is that I do slice this with the grain, some I didn't was a bit chewy but against the grain it's nice and tender. Bellies I make no effort to figure out the grain (it runs many different directions in a belly).
Next up...trying the same thing with a chuck roast to see how close to corned beef it is.
If you're on the fence with trying Buckboard Bacon, give it a go! It IS bacon!
Steve
I've been making bacon with the dry method in a vacuum bag using pork belly and it's turned out well. I live in a small town in Nebraska though and pork bellies are hard to find as the grocery stores don't normally carry it and the only butcher shop doesn't either, though he can order it, ordering is a little expensive though.
Pork butts are readily available though and go on sale often, so I decided to give Buckboard Bacon a try. I was wondering what it would taste like. We do occasionally custom slaughter a pig and we've had the locker make Cottage Bacon. It was good, but was more pork/ham than bacon tasting.
I cut the bone out, cut it in half and squared the chunks up, but that was all the trimming I did. I went with the same formula I use for pork belly - 2% uniodized salt (I used the finer, table salt sized grain stuff I had left over from making Pop's Breakfast sausage), .75% plain white table sugar (I'm border line diabetic so bumped this down to the low end and actually like it better lower, plus earlier when I used 1% I used brown sugar and I had some sticking while frying issues. I may bump this lower to see if it makes any difference to me), and the mandatory .25% cure #1.
We sealed it up in a vac bag and left it in the fridge, flipping it every day, for three weeks. Usually I go two, but we caught COVID and I just wasn't up to dealing with it at the time. By the time we were over COVID the weather had turned from mild to scorching, so I skipped the smoking step.
Gave it a fry and...it is BACON!!! NO pork or ham taste, it's definitely bacon through and through! It's delicious! The only difference between it and the belly bacon is that I do slice this with the grain, some I didn't was a bit chewy but against the grain it's nice and tender. Bellies I make no effort to figure out the grain (it runs many different directions in a belly).
Next up...trying the same thing with a chuck roast to see how close to corned beef it is.
If you're on the fence with trying Buckboard Bacon, give it a go! It IS bacon!
Steve
