Bacon, smoked and salted, is incredibly tasty, but an expensive product that not every family can afford. You can significantly reduce costs by learning how to cook your own bacon.
Dry Salting Bacon Recipe
In fact, salting bacon is no different from preparing lard for the future. There are 2 ways of salting: dry and in brine.
To salt homemade bacon, you need the following ingredients: 1 kg of pork belly, a head of garlic, 100 g of coarse rock salt, 1-2 bay leaves, spices.
Bacon - pork belly, pieces of meat with pronounced fat layers. When choosing a brisket for pickling, you should pay attention to its quality. The meat should be an even pink color and the fat veins should be white. If you press the meat with your finger, the fossa quickly disappears. Best for salting bacon is a brisket with wide strips of meat and narrow fat strips.
The brisket is cut into pieces 10-12 cm wide. The meat is thoroughly washed, the rib bones are cut off and dried with paper napkins. Peel the garlic and cut the cloves into thin slices. The salt is mixed with your favorite spices such as black pepper. Pieces of pork are rubbed thoroughly with the mixture. The thicker the brisket, the more salt you need.
Then the pieces of pork are stuffed with some of the garlic and transferred to a convenient container, skin side down. The upper part of the brisket is covered with the remnants of the garlic, the bay leaf is added and covered with the remnants of the mixture of salt and seasonings.
Within 2 days, the brisket should be salted at room temperature. Then it is sent to the refrigerator for 3 days. During salting, the liquid secreted by the bacon should be periodically drained from the container. The finished brisket is washed in running cold water and dried with napkins. It is best to store homemade bacon in the freezer, wrapped in plastic wrap.
Salting homemade bacon in brine
To prepare a liter of brine, the following products will be required: 100 g of salt, 10 g of sugar, 1-2 bay leaves, 5-6 black peppercorns, seasonings to taste.
The meat is washed and placed in a deep saucepan in dense layers. The water is boiled by adding salt, sugar, bay leaves and spices to a saucepan. Chunks of brisket are poured with cooled brine. The brine should completely cover the meat. You can press down on the brisket with a load.
The container is kept in a cool place for 3-4 days. This time should be enough for salting small pieces of brisket. Salted meat is washed, dried and stored in the freezer. The wet bacon ambassador has a distinct advantage. The salt penetrates the product faster and is evenly distributed. In addition, the output is lightly salted, very tasty bacon.
