Food Smokers and Smoking Tips/Tricks/Techniques

So much for dibs . Guess I didn't show up in time

 

Instant Pot, it’s quick for during the week meals. This is part of a deer ham, with potatoes and carrots. Looks a little dry but it’s not!

 

It barely made it through the rest period!

 

The filet side of that is HUGE!

 

It was delicious. Wife did a good job picking that one out.

 

Finally got my annual blood work done for health discount at work... Thinking steak now for some reason sounds good

 

Back in late December I called the local butcher and order 10lbs of jowls. Jowls were $1.69 per lb. The two larger ones got Black Forest Maple spice (that's all I had or they'd have all gotten this spice) and the smaller 3 got a brown sugar and black pepper rub.

Jowls laid out and weights marked on the parchment paper.

Then the cure and spice weighed out and put in coffee filter (cheap easy and disposable cure/spice holder.

Each jowl rubbed and put in its own bag labeled with weight, date and spice combo then placed in a bus tub and back to the fridge for a week or two. Then they will get cold smoked for 30 or 40 hours over Applewood smoke and then hanged in the basement for a few days to age.

Jowls weighted in at

1090g = 2.40 lbs
965g = 2.13 lbs
787g = 1.73 lbs
615g = 1.35 lbs
645g = 1.42 lbs

 

So after a couple weeks curing, several days air drying and 40 hours of smoke here is what they are looking like:

Last evening the bacons went back on the smoker for another 10 hour smoke session and will get another 1 to 3 to total smoke time will be 70 to 80 hrs then hanged in the fridge for 5 to 7 days age.

 

I would love to try this just to see (taste) if it really worth all the effort you put into it. I don't think I would have the patience you do. I would be eating it after after the first smoke.

 

For me it would have to be "Slap your mama good" to do it.

 

Not as good as Tony C's but here you go

 

Best blood work I ever had done was being on Atkins for almost a year. Started each day with at least 6 pieces of bacon. My primary care physician is a chair at Mayo Clinic and told me that he couldn't condone Atkins but what ever I was doing keep doing it.

Which is kind of ironic. The most controlled diet-heart study in history was done by a U of M Doctor in the 70's but never published. His son is a cardiologist at Mayo and discovered his fathers computer 9 track tapes and data in the basement of the house he grew up in a couple of years ago. After analyzing the data it shows what another study done around the same time in Australia did, animal fats aren't bad for you but vegetable fats are. Going to take a long time to reverse entrenched opinions on it however. Or more funding for research. In the meantime people are rewarded for not eating the more healthy fat in meat.

Personally I am not a fan of jowl bacon Some like it, others not so much. It is still bacon though. Have a friend that comes out to a sporting clays shoot we both attend down in Wi. each year from Pa. and he always brings some homemade jowl bacon. I much prefer belly bacon and most of us in attendance do. However he does bring me some scrapple and this stuff so all is good.

 

It really is not a lot of work at all. You'll spend more time preparing 1 homemade dinner than I will spend total hands on time making these bacons. Total hands on time is maybe 90 minutes. It is however a tremendous amount of waiting.

I recently completed a black forest belly bacon that took 40 days from beginning to end and it is AMAZING and worth any all and even more effort if it required.

 

I live in an area where scrapple is everywhere. While I'm not opposed to eating offal I have never eaten even 1 single bite of scrapple. It just doesn't appeal to me.

As for Yuengling have your buddy bring you down some Premium (only sold in PA), Porter and Lord Chesterfield Ale. All Yuengling and all better than their Lager.

 

Being from the west side of the country, when I was stationed in MD. I had to try it just because. wasnt bad, seems like a comfort food if you had it growing up. I dont miss it since I never really grew up around it but would eat it if I had it available.

 

Homemade bacon I am finding that compared to mass produced store bought there is absolutely no comparison. Store bought stuff has a lot of water (in my estimate 15 to 20%). When you 1st start cooking it you have a pool of water that needs to boil off. Then after the water is evaporated and the fat starts to render and fry, the bacon shrivels up to about 33% of it original size. After removing a 12oz pack of bacon from the frying pan 15% was water, 50% is fat still in the pan you have about 35% of you original purchase to eat. Meaning you just paid a lot of money for water and fat.

My bacon leeches out no water when it starts to cook. Firstly because I didn't inject it with a bunch of cheap chemicals and water to get it to cure in 2 days. Secondly because it hanged to air dry and condense flavors and it doesn't have a lot of water in it. Last week I sliced and baked over a pound of bacon. In the end the bacon shrank about 15% and after cooking there was somewhere around 3 tablespoons of rendered fat left behind. The texture and flavor second to none. This is product of time not of chemical enhancement trying to fool the calendar.

 

Completely agree. Homemade is on another level. I mean all pig bacon is good..., but doing it at home is worth the wait.

 

I was raised in North Central Pa. and grew up on scrapple. My grandfather made his own. Before we went hunting Grandma would cook a bunch of scrapple and always comment a man shouldn't spend all day in the woods without starting the day out with scrapple and eggs. I loved it then and still do although many don't. Whenever I go back "home" to the Endless Mountains of Pa. it is not hard to find good scrapple. Long ways from hard core Amish country like Lancaster, Pa. where I spent a year on recruiting duty in the mid 80's. A year down with the Flatlanders was long enough. Some good people though and plenty of limestone creeks with good trout fishing.

Once I started making my own bacon the first thing I noticed is that I stopped ruining shirts with grease stains when cooking it. The water coming out of the bacon is what causes it to splatter. Since making my own I no longer use a splatter screen, and my shirts last longer LOL.

I go through a lot of bacon and have a hard time staying up with making my own. Have a 10 pound belly in the fridge now need to get going on it. In between bellies I have found Costco thick sliced bacon is about as good as it gets, at least with less injected water. The taste of course is not as good as using real maple sugar and smoke. But works in a pinch. With that said the last package splattered so consistency isn't always there. I hope they didn't change it.

Took off work today to get some things done. Including snow removal from the dump Sunday night after I grilled the Filipino BBQ pork belly. Got the truck free and started on the deck. Shoveled a path to the charcoal chimney and decided to take a break and grill some hamburgers for my son and bacon cheddar brat patties for me. And caramelize some onion slices.



With King Hawaiian buns.

 

Some trim them first St Louis style. They say 3-2-1 for spares.

 

Put em on the smoker!!