Large Batch Bacon Curing

[ammccorm]

Hey Guys!

I wanted to reach out and see if anyone out there has experience with curing pork bellies in commercial-sized batches. I run a breakfast pop up restaurant two days a week and we make our own bacon. I currently do what you might call a dry-wet cure, vacuum-sealing a dry cure with a whole pork belly and turning it over every couple days. It works very well, but the bags are a bit narrow for the bellies and the method of individually weighing and bagging each belly is time consuming and does not gain efficiency with scaling up production. I want to open as a full time restaurant and would be curing and smoking 20-40 bellies at a time. It feels like there is no way someone who wants to make bacon on a small-scale commercial level would work this way, but haven't found any more efficient methods through research or industry contacts. Also, I cringe at the amount of plastic I'll be throwing away on a weekly basis and my local health inspector frowns on vacuum sealing. I want to keep the beautiful, consistent results but am at a loss as to how to do so when production intensifies. Any thoughts, guys and gals? Thanks in advance!

 

[Jabiru]

In the past we used large food grade buckets ( I think about 80 litre) with Wet Brine in our chiller - for bulk Corned Beef. We could fit about 40KG in each tub. Give it a stir every few days.

From Butcher supplies.

May help.

Poly Brine Tub - 54 x 61cm - (84L)

Natural Colour NOTE: Lid sold separately

butcherquip.com.au

 

[tropics]

pops6927 His family was into doing what you want. Send him a PM he maybe able to help.
Richie

 

[HalfSmoked]

Yup Richie gave you a great contact for doing a wet brine cure.

Warren

 

[chef jimmyj]

Pops would know...JJ

 

[pops6927]

At my dad's store, we would do 300 lbs of bellies at a time, by tossing them in a 55 gal barrel, then covering it with curing brine and using 5 gallon plastic bags filled with regular water and the top screwed on and soaked in the curing brine, insuring that no bellies float on top, not immersed in the curing brine, then rolled into the curing cooler and cured for minimum 21 days, preferably 28 days, Then we would use a large hook to yank them out of the curing brine into a 6-wheel dolly and rolled into the smokehouse room. where we would attach bacon hangers into each belly and hang in the smokehouse to get 8-10 hours of crushed corn cob smoke put to them, and heated to a minimum 135° internal, running an external temp of 225° to accomplish the smoking and partially cooking! Then, we would pull 20 slabs or more after partially cooling and remove the rind, or skin, to chill for slicing. The rest were sold "rind on", after proper refrigeration. The pulled slabs were typically nearest the walls of the smokehouse as they would cook more and be easier to remove the rind (in some cases we would just slide a meat knife under the skin to loosen it, then pull the rind off with Vice-Grips!)

55 gal drums - https://www.grainger.com/product/RU...!3!317451746052!b!!g!!&cm_mmc=PPC:+Google+PPC

5 gal. water jugs - https://smartbottleinc.com/index.html?gclid=CjwKCAiAsIDxBRAsEiwAV76N8wEcxRMTcVRCS6Kdps5x7RIFCOh2YwnkmajyzsnstCcVNSh0fPt1ehoCLO0QAvD_BwE#!/Smart-Bottle®-Outdoor-with-18MM-Fast-Pour-Spout-2-5-Gallon-$12-45-or-5-Gallon-$13-45/p/84303370/category=23422549?_vsrefdom=adwords

Long handle meat hook - https://www.google.com/shopping/pro...Rs-y9NhYPbuDaaTSgPs2S6s0gUxkdk6xoC93AQAvD_BwE