Charcuterie Archives — greekbowhunter

Today is the day! Follow these simple steps to forever change your perspective on what this all-American staple is capable of being.

I want to take a moment to thank my original charcuterie mentor Seth Davis over at Crooked Oak Brewing Co. (IG: crookedoakbrewingco) for the friendship, tutelage and support in my quest to get on his level at the charcuterie game.

Homemade Cherry Smoked Bacon

Homemade bacon changes your life forever. Once you discover how easy it is to take ownership of the skills and means by which to produce your own bacon, you'll never look at store bacon the same again. To compare the two would be akin to comparing a Pinto to a Ferrari.

Follow these simple steps to another huge milestone in your culinary liberation.

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Prep Time 7 d

Cook Time 10 hrs

Course Breakfast

Cuisine American

Servings 20 people

Equipment

Stainless steel pellet smoking tube
Smokehouse, smoker or other smoke chamber
Food scale that measures in grams
Meat hooks for hanging the bellied while smoking

Ingredients

2 % Salt kosher
1.5 % Sugar granulated
0.25 % Curing Salt

Instructions

Remove pork belly from packaging, and using your food scale, measure its weight in grams. Ensure you tare the scale if you're placing the belly on a plate on the scale (which you likely will be, to keep the scale clean).
Set the belly aside, place a small bowl on the scale, and tare the scale. Then calculate 2% of the weight of the belly, and weigh out that much salt. Move the salt to a second small bowl.
With a now empty bowl on the scale, tare the scale again, and add sugar to 1.5% of the weight of the belly, and again, move it to the second bowl.
Now, with an empty bowl on the scale again, tare it once more, and add 0.25% curing salt. Please take special care not to botch the math (I've almost done this many times by missing a zero when doing the percentage).
Mix the weighed ingredients together.
Place the belly in a large ziploc bag, and add half of the weighed out mixture to each side of the belly, rubbing it in well on both sides.
(optional) record the weight of the belly and all of the ingredients on the bag for future notes and fine tuning of the cure to your liking.
Remove most of the air from the bag, and place in your fridge for seven days, flipping every day during that week.
After seven days, remove the belly, and pat it dry, and use meat hooks to hang the belly in your smoke chamber of choice.
(optional) lightly coat the bellies with pepper. I prefer 16 mesh for bacon.
Fill the smoke tube with cherry pellets (or any other pellets you feel like using, but cherry is the best in my opinion), and light one end so it starts smoldering like a huge cigar.
Cold smoke for ten hours, ensuring that the temp inside your smoke chamber does not exceed 90 degrees Fahrenheit. If it gets over 90F, remove the bacon, put it up in the fridge, and start again once your ambient temps drop enough (this might have to be at night if you live in a hot climate or its summer). I often fill the water tray in my smoker with ice to help bring the temp down if I'm running too hot.
After at least ten hours of smoke, you're good to remove the bacon, slice, package and enjoy. Don't be afraid to experiment with longer smoke times or different pellets to make it your own!

Keyword Bacon, Cold Smoked, Cold Smoked Bacon, EQ Bacon, Equilibrium Cured Bacon, Homemade Bacon, Smoked Bacon

I couldn’t have imagined when I started this process, that a wild hog (even for me, a consummate fan of all things related to eating wild game) could have become such phenomenally flavorful and savory ham. It all started with the kill, naturally, and his was no ordinary wild hog. As good as your average hog is, this one was the stuff of dreams: a huge sow, fattened on a diet of a local farmer’s sorghum crop, and putting on weight before bearing a litter of bacon seeds. I spotted the sounder to which she belonged enter the field from a distant CRP pasture, and began a 500 yard stalk with the AR. Mind you, at this point I’d been on a dry streak with the hogs, and I decided to give the bow a break and bring down the thunder since I had a mad hankering for wild pork! I kept the wind in my face, and when she looked my direction to try to finally determine what I was, I was 20 yards away and had the drop on her – goodnight Ms. Piggie!

I took her home, where she weighed out at 180 pounds, and got to work from there. However, upon butchering her, I discovered just how noticeable the difference was between this pig and the countless others I had killed. Her fat levels were through the roof, and even her strip loin was laced with fat veins!

Strip Loin — Beautifully marbled strip loin!

Truly, if there were such a thing as wagyu pork, this pig would have qualified as such. Needless to say, I was excited! My buddy David had told me about how delicious his first pass at making ham out of wild hogs had gone, so I decided to borrow my brine formula I use for corned beef, and get to it. For the brine recipe, scroll down to the bottom of this post!

After 10 days of soaking in the brine, all that remained was around 10 hours of mesquite smoke, beginning at 160 degrees, and building up to 260 degrees for the final stretch. The idea here is to warm the center of the ham while the outside is absorbing smoke, but not so rapidly that you end up completely drying out the exterior of the ham and making a bark that’s too chewy and bitter.

Wild Hog Ham — Just after removing from the smoke.

Cured wild hog ham — Perfectly spiced and sliced.