Home Smoked, Home Cured, Home Cooked, Cooking with Gas

MY LIFE WITH BACON continues by cooking up some great home cured, home smoked, home cooked bacon, about which I blogged recently.

This is on cast iron. Jack's high school football team won its state playoff game; COOKIN' WITH GAS: http://jwcdaily.com/2017/10/27/spotlight-charleston-scouts-had-a-good-time-in-playoff-win/

Home-Cured Bacon, Inovasi, and More Bacon Crime

MY LIFE WITH BACON continues with some good, old-fashioned home-cured and smoked bacon, plus the standard Bacon In The News section.

I really like the flavor profile of the spice cardamon, so I searched for a bacon cure recipe using that ingredient. Check out the Wikipedia article on cardamom; pretty interesting. Had no idea it was commonly used in Scandanavia. Apparently lots of folks from the middle east and India visited the nordic countries as far back as Viking days. A quote from the article:

"It is a common ingredient in Indian cooking. It is also often used in baking in the Nordic countries, in particular in Sweden, Norway and Finland, where it is used in traditional treats such as the Scandinavian Jule bread Julekake, the Swedish kardemummabullar sweet bun, and Finnish sweet bread pulla. In the Middle East, green cardamom powder is used as a spice for sweet dishes, as well as traditional flavouring in coffee and tea. Cardamom is used to a wide extent in savoury dishes. In some Middle Eastern countries, coffee and cardamom are often ground in a wooden mortar, a mihbaj, and cooked together in a skillet, a mehmas, over wood or gas, to produce mixtures as much as 40% cardamom."

The recipe I used for the cure is as follows (and of course I added curing salt), from here. This is apparently an "Old School" "Old World" recipe.

Black Forest Spice Mixture
125gm White pepper
 25gm Ground nutmeg
 25gm Ground mace
 15gm Ground cardamom
200gm White sugar

And a picture of the cure in a small bowl:

I obtained my pork belly from Inovasi, a terrific restaurant located in Lake Bluff, IL. The proprieter, Jon des Rosiers, is continually changing his farm-to-table recipes, and uses only locally raised meat.

This belly is from a pig farm in Wisconsin, and here's the raw belly. Lookin' good:

Carefully coated with the cure:

Packaged up and ready to sit, flip daily, for a total of ten days:

After the ten days, I rinsed it off thoroughly, and set it in a separate refrigerator for another week, with a pan of kosher salt underneath, to dry cure a little longer. The belly really firmed up and smelled wonderful.

Then it was time for the smoker. 225 degrees until the internal temperature hit 150, with large applewood chunks. Here is what it looked like after coming out of the smoker. The aroma was 'to die for'...

Pan frying in cast iron. Incredible flavor, great color, used in a brussels sprouts recipe too.

BACON IN THE NEWS

This week, a woman was reported to the police for assaulting her boyfriend with a package of bacon. As usual, you 'can't make this stuff up'. This crime was, of course, pretty tame compared to attempting to KILL your boyfriend using bacon (see my presentation at last year's Camp Bacon in a recent post). Here's the link.

GO EAT SOME BACON. See you next time...