Dry Curing Bacon #1 - Belly Pork for Streaky Breakfast Rashers

To cure your own bacon you have basically two choices, either wet cure or dry cure. Wet curing is where you submerge the meat in a solution of water, salt etc, whereas dry curing is a matter of rubbing dry ingredients into the meat to cure it. Dry curing isn't particularly dry though actually, as the meat will very quickly start to release liquid. Its my fav method for making bacons and gammons, so I decided to start off the bacon recipes with a simple cure thats ideal for a first trial but gives excellent results.

Dry curing bacon requires just a little more effort than a wet cure but takes up a little less space. I find that dry cures lend the meat a better flavour than the wet cures in most cases, so 90% of my bacons are dry cured and its worth every bit of the extra effort.

The ingredients you use for a dry cure are somewhat a matter of taste and experimentation. A good base though is essential and quantities need to be carefully controlled, especially when using Sodium Nitrite or the propriatory cures powders (Prague Powders or Cure #1 or #2 ).

A good springboard for later experiments is the following recipe. Here I was doing a simple streaky bacon, but the base cure is just the same no matter what cut you want to make into bacon. 

Basic Dry Cure ( for 5 kgs Pork Belly)

100g  Coarse or Medium Grained Salt
20g    Garlic Powder / Granules
120g  Soft Brown Sugar
12g    Cure #1 (Optional)
20g    Pepper

Put ingredients into a large bowl and mix throughly to ensure an even distribution.

It is important to keep your meat cool at all times, removing from the fridge as briefly as possible at each step. Temperature is very important with extended curing times. Cut meat surfaces are vulnerable to bacteria looking for a darn good feed......just as they are to us! Because some curing techniques can take long periods of time to accomplish a stable and healthy product, any bacteria present may get a fair old crack of the whip at those cut meat surfaces. Ok ....the salt and cure powders will be dealing with many of the potential causes of spoilage, but far, far, better to give the bacteria the least chance possible of doing the dirty on you and giving the cure the chance to really work its magic!

The way we accomplish this is by following good sanitary practices and respect as fully as possible what the french call "la chaine de froid".....which means keeping meat at cold temperatures throughout processing and through to consumption. The colder the temperature, the less active any bacteria will be and as a consquencethey will only reproduce very slowly. A good temperature range that will allow the cure to work properly and ensure nasty conditions for those bacteria is between 0°C and 4°C. Most domestic fridges will easily maintain 4°C.

Remove any bits of rib and any blood adhering to the belly. If you want rind off bacon, you can remove the skin now, but you may find it easier to do more neatly after the cure. If you do remove the skin now, it will make for a slightly shorter curing time...without the barrier of skin the cure will penetrate the fat and meat more easily...just take a day or two off the curing time.

Cut the belly into three roughly equal slabs, wash in cold water, towel dry, then pierce the slabs all over with a point.......I use a skewer. This helps get the cure into the meat and channel moisture out of the meat.

Divide your rub by the number of slabs you have to cure...I will usually make three slabs of bacon out of each side, which gives me two good bits for rashers and a third piece for roasting or cutting up into lardons.

Take each slab and apply the cure to all the meaty surfaces...rub a little on the skin if you have left it on, but concentrate the bulk of the cure on the other side and edges. Be careful to evenly apply the cure all over the meat, paying a little extra attention to holes or folds and all around the edges of the bacon to ensure an even cure.

You will need some sort of sealable container to store your meat safely whilst it cures. If you have space in the fridge for a large plastic tub big enough to fit your slabs into, thats just fine. If you have less room in the fridge you can always use a freezer/cooler box instead and store in a cold place. When I use this method I keep a supply of ice blocks in the freezer and use these to ensure a temperature below 4°C is maintained at all times......changing three blocks every 12 hrs is the price to pay!


Pop your slabs into the container and store in the fridge. Placing slabs on top of each other is fine, just change their order when it comes to overhauling the meat.......Hang on an min.....what does he mean overhauling the meat!! Well.... now your bacon is nicely covered in salt and sugar, it will quickly begin to exude liquid...the salt gets to work fast and you will notice a pool of liquid forming in the bottom of the container after just a few hours. Leave this to accumulate overnight, then open your box, take out the slabs and remove the liquid. Quickly rerub the surfaces of the meat with the remaining cure, massaging them helps get the cure in.  Return meat to the container in the fridge, stacking the slabs in a different order, so that its not always the same piece of bacon at the bottom sitting in the juice. Repeat this "overhaul" every 24 hrs, throughout the curing process.



So how long will all this take?

This very much depends on the thickness of the meat and the saltiness/keeping qualities required. Here we are doing a no nonsense unsmoked streaky bacon...using a supermarket bought belly that weighed in at 6 kilos.....once tidied up and deboned (it had a small section of ribs attached) that gave me 5 kgs of meat to cure! The slabs averaged about 4cm in thickness..so, just over an inch and a half.

A good rule of thumb for dry curing bacon is to allow the cure a week for each inch of thickness of meat. This rule of thumb however will give quite a salty result (although not excessively salty) which will give a bacon that is a good keeper, although not heavily enough salted to be stored out of the fridge or for extended periods. I went for 7 days for my 4cm slabs, as I prefer to err on the side of less salt and rely on vacuum packing and/or freezing for longer term storage.

For a first try I would go with the 7 days per inch of thickness rule of thumb and see how you like it from there.

When the waiting is finally over, remove the slabs from the tub and rinse each throughly under running water to remove any remaining bits of pepper, salt and sugar.  Towel dry then place each slab uncovered in the bottom of the fridge or hang in a shed/garage to dry overnight, this allows the salt to stabilise evenly throughout the meat.

The next morning....... I'm guessing that its surely going to be bacon for breakfast!!!!!

It is however better, to resist temptation and leave the bacon a little longer to mature before packing. This can be done either in the fridge or by hanging the bacon in a cold cellar, garage our outbuilding. You can use hangers from your smoker, butchers S's or just bend up some thick gauge wire and make your own bacon hangers (especially handy if you want to go ahead and smoke the bacon you have just made!) Two or three days is fine...in any case, you can always hang two up and start using the first slab right away...........rather!

When doing a whole belly its probably best to keep one slab in the fridge for immediate (within a week) use and freeze or vac pack the rest. Vac packed in the fridge bacon should be good for upto three or four weeks.....in the freezer a good six months.

This base recipe will make a very good bacon as it is, but can also be smoked for extra flavour. More on that later!

Happy New Year

Guy