LOL. K-fed requested pictures of bacon so here they are.....
This will be my first sharing of food I like to make at home. I'm a professionally trained cook, a graduate of culinary school. Currently jobless at the moment, you know the economy and all that. Looking into some employment opportunities as we speak. Perhaps I'll find employment overseas.
I've always loved charcuterie and ever since a year ago I've been playing around with making sausages and cured meats. But then the problem with being in asia and in a 3rd world country is that one doesn't really get much access to ingredients that would be ideal, I mean there are but I would have to have a restaurant to have access to them as they are only sold to restaurants and even then they would keep that as a highly regarded resource that they would never divulge so easily.
This is my first try in making bacon with curing salts. I've always made them without and as a person who has always had (and many of us do) the conventional kind, the more modern kind, it had always been made with nitrites and nitrates or whatever. So I made a batch of dry cure based off of Michael Ruhlman's book Charcuterie and used that as my base. I've been making bacon without curing salts for a while now so I wanna see if I know I can make good bacon out of local pork with the cure and and a few other additions.
here's the pic of my bacon now being cured in a ziplock bag. about 1.6 kilos after trimming off the soft bone and the skin. I cut it in half as I don't have a deli slicer or a long enough knife to cut it down properly, and ziplocks only come in sandwich size and gallon size bags here. This was a perfect time for me play around with my new lefty hankotsu from korin. Which by the way, did wonderfully. I always ask the part nearer the rib cage as belly here is a lot fatter nowadays as it used to. so it had some bone in it that had to be taken out.
I like my food spicy and I wanted to try out a different kind of bacon, one with a dry rub so I added some herbs and spices that I thought would go well with it. Not a lot of bacon variety out here as you can gather. I also added some liquid smoke to give it a smokey flavor. I know the pictures aren't much to look at but hopefully in 7-10 days of curing and then another day in the fridge to dry out will do it.
I don't have a smoker so pardon the lack of equipment. Maybe one day I'll have some cash to get myself a smoker.
I'll put in more pix of the bacon after the whole process has been finished. Sorry if I never got to take pictures of the hankotsu and the pork belly in action. I was just overly excited using it and too hungry to think. LOL.
Be patient, the bacon will come!
I'll add onto whatever else I cook that I deem to be worthy posting. =D
This will be my first sharing of food I like to make at home. I'm a professionally trained cook, a graduate of culinary school. Currently jobless at the moment, you know the economy and all that. Looking into some employment opportunities as we speak. Perhaps I'll find employment overseas.
I've always loved charcuterie and ever since a year ago I've been playing around with making sausages and cured meats. But then the problem with being in asia and in a 3rd world country is that one doesn't really get much access to ingredients that would be ideal, I mean there are but I would have to have a restaurant to have access to them as they are only sold to restaurants and even then they would keep that as a highly regarded resource that they would never divulge so easily.
This is my first try in making bacon with curing salts. I've always made them without and as a person who has always had (and many of us do) the conventional kind, the more modern kind, it had always been made with nitrites and nitrates or whatever. So I made a batch of dry cure based off of Michael Ruhlman's book Charcuterie and used that as my base. I've been making bacon without curing salts for a while now so I wanna see if I know I can make good bacon out of local pork with the cure and and a few other additions.
here's the pic of my bacon now being cured in a ziplock bag. about 1.6 kilos after trimming off the soft bone and the skin. I cut it in half as I don't have a deli slicer or a long enough knife to cut it down properly, and ziplocks only come in sandwich size and gallon size bags here. This was a perfect time for me play around with my new lefty hankotsu from korin. Which by the way, did wonderfully. I always ask the part nearer the rib cage as belly here is a lot fatter nowadays as it used to. so it had some bone in it that had to be taken out.
I like my food spicy and I wanted to try out a different kind of bacon, one with a dry rub so I added some herbs and spices that I thought would go well with it. Not a lot of bacon variety out here as you can gather. I also added some liquid smoke to give it a smokey flavor. I know the pictures aren't much to look at but hopefully in 7-10 days of curing and then another day in the fridge to dry out will do it.
I don't have a smoker so pardon the lack of equipment. Maybe one day I'll have some cash to get myself a smoker.
I'll put in more pix of the bacon after the whole process has been finished. Sorry if I never got to take pictures of the hankotsu and the pork belly in action. I was just overly excited using it and too hungry to think. LOL.
Be patient, the bacon will come!
I'll add onto whatever else I cook that I deem to be worthy posting. =D