Makin' Bacon – Finally! – for Charcutepalooza

Well I finally feel as though I'm on track with the meat fest, or pork party, known as Charcutepalooza. It took me a long time to get my hands on the curing salts. (You may recall, gentle reader, that they hadn't arrived by the bacon deadline, so I posted instead about sodium nitrate, hoping that would count as my February submission in the monthly Charcutepalooza roundup.) Now I have enough nitrites to cure a piece of meat the size of a Volkswagen, and here are my two 1.5-pound slabs of pork belly, curing themselves into bacon, from Rowe Farms, who got them from a local Mennonite pig farmer.

I have had some very interesting conversations around town about meat curing in general and bacon in particular. Kyle Deming, the chef at Toronto oyster restaurant Starfish and its sister establishment Ceili Cottage, was especially enlightening. He's planning soon to open a retail outlet for his business Sausage Partners (how does he have time? He also has a small child!) As you might guess, Sausage Partners is about the foods he creates with raw ingredients from Kawartha Ecological Growers. His shop, which may be located near Queen Street East and Greenwood, will offer preserved foods of all kinds, including charcuterie.

But back to the subject at hand... After all my travails in acquiring pink salt, Kyle D. informs me (as does Michael of Hand Crafted) that bacon can safely be made with no nitrites, as it is cooked before eating. (Twice-cooked, actually, if you smoke or bake it, then fry it.) I suppose boiling it would not kill botulism, though, because boiling soup or stew only reaches 212°F, whereas botulism survives up to 240°F; this is the problem with hot water-bath canning of low acid produce... but I digress once more.

Since I'm a bacon newbie, I went straight by the book. One of these batches (the one on the right) includes maple syrup; the other is Ruhlman's suggested blend of bay leaves, peppercorns and garlic, which I smashed up coarsely together in a stone mortar and pestle. Jonathan will no doubt want to fry some of this up for breakfasts when it's ready; I have dreams of a French Canadian pea soup to honour the Habitant quarter of my gene pool.

Just an aside: having read of the dangers of ingesting large quantities of sodium nitrite, seeing that the curing mix really does resemble something that might go into morning coffee, and having a remarkably forgetful husband, I am taking no chances!