Bacon Drama

We have been spending a lot of time with our pork these days. The other day I made sausage for the first time, which was so incredibly easy (if you don't bother with casings), that I can't believe I hadn't done it before. Basically, ground pork + herbs/spices + molding into patties = sausage. Who knew? OK, you probably did, but it was a nice surprise to me. I imagine I'll be doing that a lot more with ground pork in the future.

On the other spectrum of difficulty, we spent much of the day attempting to make bacon for the first time. A few days ago, we thawed one of the pork bellies from the freezer, which was 8 lbs of pork. We laid the pieces out flat on cookie sheets and casserole dishes (three were required) and rubbed a lot of salt and a little bit of pepper into the meat, then drizzled a little apple cider on top. We covered them and put them in the fridge to cure for 2 days (recommendations on curing seem to range from 24 hrs to 7 days). This morning, we tried using the grill to smoke the pork, as that seemed like the best option since we don't have a smokehouse. The book we were using as a reference said to soak wood chips for at least an hour, ignite them, then when they are smoldering place them on one side of the grill and the meat on the opposite side. What we pretty quickly found challenging was that you can't ignite wet wood chips! Orrin then did some on-line research and someone suggested lighting a few briquettes and then adding the chips to that. We tried that several times, but the wet chips kept putting out the briquettes and we had to reheat them. Finally, the chips must have dried out enough that they started to take the heat from the briquettes, and began smoking. We almost threw in the towel and were going to try it again tomorrow, but decided to put about 1 lb of the pork on the grill to try to smoke it, to at least practice on that. It's tricky to keep the grill on low enough to not cook the meat, yet still provide enough heat to keep the chips smoldering. We were trying for 210F in the grill, but mostly it was around 150 or 160F. Once we got to 150F in the meat (the recommended temperature), we stopped, which was late this afternoon. We cooked up our first batch of bacon and definitely got the smoky taste but also found that it was way too salty, so I must not have rinsed off enough of the salt from the meat, or else I put way too much on the first place (which I didn't actually think was possible, since I was following a recipe, and since the point of the salt is to draw out the water from the meat). I'll try rinsing the remaining meat some more before we start up again tomorrow. We chopped up the remains from today and threw it into the pot of lentils that was cooking on the stove for dinner, and it was delicious – and not too salty.

And hey, we made bacon!