I finally talked my wife into keeping one of the bellies fresh when we got our last hog. Also have the jowls. Now it is time to make the bacon!
The plan is to "practice" on the jowls to get her preferred wood. The first two jowls will be hickory and apple. Also want to keep it lower sodium so going with 1% salt and 1% sugar
Here is what I have for the calcs:
Jowl #1
374 g & 1"
1.0 g Cure #1
2.9g Salt
3.8g Sugar
Jowl #2
506g & 1.5"
1.3 g Cure #1
3.9g Salt
5.1g Sugar
Questions -
- If you reduce the salt, should you also proportionately reduce the sugar to keep the right balance?
- If I start the cure today, Jowl #1 should be good to smoke next Sunday with #2 on Monday? (need to get them done early next week since we have other obligations the following weekend)
- this will be the first smoke in the MES, so how long should these smoke? Planning to use the AMNPS. Still trying to determine what temp to smoke at so I know that is an input to the first part of the question.
Hi there and welcome!
I think you have a decent plan going so that's a great start.
1. I'm pretty sure your Sugar at 1% can always stay 1% independent of the salt. I don't ever pick up any sugar flavor anyhow at that low of a percentage so I doubt it will cause any unexpected taste differences with the lower salt :)
2. As for curing time, that depends mostly on how thick the meat is.
Cure#1 and salt travel about 1/4 inch into the meat per day. So a flat rectangular cut of meat like bacon you can expect 1/4 from top, 1/4 from bottom giving a total of 1/2 travel per day.
IF YOU HAVE SKIN on the meat then I believe the salt doesn't really travel well through the skin and into the meat so that can affect things.
Now that you are armed with that important bit of information you can figure out about how long it takes for your Jowels, Bellies, or hell any meat to cure.
If you have extra thick dowels and skin on then let us know and we can help you figure out if you may need to consider a wet cure where you can inject the wet cure into the meat as well so you get the cure and salt to travel both outside-in and inside-out. This really speeds up curing but takes different calculations due to adding water to the mix.
3. In the case of bacon and what u want to do with these jowls we can easily talk about smoke and cooking temp separately.
Seeing as these jowls are a little under 1pound and a little over 1 pound I wouldnt apply anymore than 2-2.5 hrs of smoke... especially if it's all hickory smoke.
I find with 10 lb pork bellies using 100% hickory smoke that going over 5hrs of 100% hickory smoke is too much so my limit is 5hrs of 100% hickory. So taking that info and applying it to 2 pounds of pork jowls that are likely not much thicker you see where I get my number.
As for cooking/smoking temp, this will depend on what you are trying to accomplish with the meat.
If you are cold smoking to then slice up and cook in a skillet like bacon then u can go 70F degrees or lower cooking/smoker temp and just apply smoke. I don't know what your ambient temps are but the smoker must be hotter than the outside temp to cause a draft to help circulate the smoke. If you don't have some kind of draft you get stale smoke that just sits in there and turns your meat into something like an ash tray and horrible flavor. Gotta have smoke circulating and moving to keep the oxygen in the mix or u get bad stale smoke and flavor... DO NOT ignore this important fact of cold smoking stuff.
If you are warm or hot smoking I think a lot of guys like to put their smokers at like 140F or so and try to bring the meat Internal Temp (IT) up to temps of 130F or close to it. The meat is still not fully cooked in this case, and usually your draft and smoke circulation issues are resolved.
If you "hot" smoke it then you basically do the sausage smoking process where you ramp your smoker up over time to like 160-170F smoker temp and go until the meat hits like 140-154F IT.
I personally do bacon this way and take it to 140-145F IT. Why???
Because I like knowing I can eat the bacon as I'm slicing it or right out of the pack because it's "fully cooked". The texture won't be greatly affected at all and you still fry it up like normal bacon.
It's simply bacon you can eat right out of the pack... which happens to 90% of the bacon I make this way because I like soft bacon and I like to use these almost as if they were cold cuts hahaha.
I threw a lot at you here so digest it, ask any questions, and I hope it helps :)
