November 15, 2015: Jalepeno Bacon at home, and a review of Pederson's Natural Apple Smoked Bacon

MY LIFE WITH BACON continues with another home-made bacon, this one inspired by last week's post. I'll cook it next week and give you a report.

I, like all of us in the civilized world, are so saddened by the events of Paris, and angered by the senseless murders. A good listen, a podcast by Sam Harris: Still Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon. Frightening.

THIS WEEK'S BACON is HOME MADE BACON inspired by Hormel Black Label Jalepeno Bacon. As you might know from last week's post, the Black Label Strip Show in Las Vegas is an actual live show; when I looked at the varieties of bacon they offer, one of them was jalepeno based.

I bought the bacon at Costco - and it came in chunk strips, typically for braising. But I chose to cure it and later, I'll smoke it. Here is the bacon, currently wet curing. I'll cure it for the week, and smoke it next weekend.

I followed the recipe below, with a few twists. One of them is a trade secret; the other is that I used tequila in addition to the bourbon.

The recipe comes from this very interesting site. Photo of the actual recipe below:

I also made some commercial bacon this week: 

PEDERSON'S NATURAL FARMS UNCURED APPLE SMOKED BACON

The package was 10 ounces, but it weighted in at 10.2 ounces. Nice little bonus. It cooked down to 2.9 ounces and produced 75 ml of bacon fat. On opening the package, it had a clean, sweet, slightly smoky aroma. Very tasty; solid, solid bacon. The bacon did curl a bit and I had to use my press to flatten those pieces out. 

Good, solid bacon.