Looks fine to me! Smoke it and fry it and if there's any left at all, send me some, lol!
It will turn a variety of colors when brining, from gray, pink, blood red, maroon, sky blue pink, etc. You are exchanging fluids (don't read into it.... lol!). Sure, you can brine it some more if you like. Curing meat is versatile and if you follow the steps (clean equipment, potable cold water, stir the ingredients until it is clear, put in the meat, weight it down (a bag-covered brick is fine! Or, just fill the ziploc half full of water. At the store, we used 5 gal. collapsable water tote bags, one or two on top, then we'd dump the water inside, rinse them out and clean them, and use 'em again and again. The brine cooler had capacity for 70 55-gallon Rubbermaid buckets and was anywhere from half to full almost all the time. We'd load in 24 slabs of bellies in a bucket, fill with brine then put one or two 5 gal bags in top. Now that bottom slab got just as cured as the top slab with 300 lbs. of other bellies on top of it plus 1 or 2 - 40 lb. bags on it, so the weight is not a problem. And you couldn't agitate it or stir it. It just sat there and cured for minimum 21 days to 30 days, depending on it's lineup in the rotation, used a long handled meat puller hook to yank the bellies out into a huge roll around tub, dumped the used brine down the floor drain and cleaned out the barrel. Rolled the tub into the smokehouse room, put bacon hangers into each belly and hung in the smokehouse 1 inch apart, nothing touching (would leave a white spot), 1 row above with 2 rows, I row under, 2 rows, 6 per smokestick, 24 total. Let them drip overnight, then fire up the smokehouse at 7 am the next morning, feed crushed corncobs into the cast iron pan we'd slide out to refill, then slide back in over the long propane burner and close the lower door. Dad had installed the two smokehouses facing each other, 3 ft. below the main floor on a cement slab. He built a trap door that you could lower to roll the tub of meat on to so you could load the smokehouses in the upper large door. Then, you push up the trap door and you could climb down a couple small steps into the 'pit' where you could open the smaller lower door and slide out the oblong cast iron pan on L bracket runs to fill the pan with the crushed corn cobs every ½ hour or so for 8-9 hours, the bacon internal temp. reaching 146° minimum. Then we'd turn off the smokehouse, let the bacon cool an hour, then pull out how many slabs we'd want for 'rindless' bacon. 50 years ago, most bacon was sold rind-on. We'd de-rind 10 slabs usually for rindless. Lay the belly skin-side up, take your knife and slide it under the skin as close as possible but not cutting through the skin, all around the outer edge, in about 1" - 1½". On some bellies that had gotten more heat (like close to the walls, gaining reflective heat) you could just grip the skin with a pair of Vice-Grips[emoji]174[/emoji] and pull the skin off clean. Most bellies, however, you'd have to keep sliding your knife just under the skin until you've sliced the skin off, as close as you could, leaving as much fat on the belly as possible. Leave the rest until the morning, then take out of the smokehouse and hang in the drip room, then into the cooler for storage. One batch would last a couple days then we'd have to start the process all over again. Plus, put down as many bellies as we'd take out to smoke. That was bacons. Hams we'd to 36 per batch into two barrels, 18 each....
We had a wooden cooler to store the smoked meats in; back then we had to keep the meats off the wood walls so we used dropcloths hung off the rail hooks and newspapers on the floor to soak up the grease; we'd have to change the papers every day, and the drop cloths between every batch of meat. But, it worked!
