*Curing Bacon, Part 1*
*NYT Recipe for Curing Bacon*

So, this might be cheating because I've already written about making a BLT, but this one has one critical difference, it uses bacon that I cured myself.

Clark's birthday is today and he requested that I make a BLT using the bacon I've been curing. I had the bacon sit in the curing spices maybe a little too long, three weeks instead of one, but it still looked okay when I pulled it out of the fridge.



I wiped off all of the spices and gunk and set the bacon in the oven to dry. Again, I screwed up and misread the directions and left the bacon way, way too long in the oven, not checking the temperature regularly.



It looked a little tough and sweaty when I pulled it out.



I cut a strip of bacon off of one of the sides to fry it up and test it out. I was freaked out at how salty it was. Thinking I'd ruined the whole batch I had Clark slice up the rest while I ran to the store and bought secret, backup bacon.



We cooked up almost all of our slices of thickly cut bacon and I sweated about the whole batch tasting like the bottom of a pretzel bag. I assembled the sandwiches using a fresh baked batch of biscuits, and lettuce and tomatoes from the garden.

I nervously watched Clark bite into his birthday sandwich.

He chewed for a little bit.

I held my breath and watched him swallow.

He smiled and nodded at me.

I took a bite into my own mini-sandwich a it tasted just fine. The bacon was chewy and not too salty, with a hint of garlic. I guess the outer 1/2 inch gets the full brunt of the cure and the inside stays much more mild. Phew.

In other news, I tried to make my own mayonnaise and it was a complete failure. Mayonnaise: 1, Alison: 0

Labels: food, projects

posted by Alison 7/19/2009 02:45:00 PM : (0) comments : splink