Smoked Bacon
Cooking time: 3 h
Difficulty: Medium recipe
Recipe yield: 1,3 kg
Ukrainian Food Recipes
Smoked bacon is a recipe for Ukrainian cuisine, for this recipe it is better to choose not pure bacon, but with layers of meat – pork belly. Before smoking, lard should be well salted in saline with the addition of garlic and onions. After salting, fat must be sodden for another day, and then smoked. With this recipe you can make hot smoked bacon. For smoking fat at home, it is best to use cherry sawdust, it gives a special aroma. You can also add juniper twigs or sawdust – they will enhance the aroma of smoked bacon and give it a more interesting taste. If you do not have a smokehouse at home, it can be made from improvised kitchen utensils. Pour sawdust into a deep roasting pan, place the wire rack, preferably on high legs, place the smoking product on the wire rack, cover and put everything on fire. It will turn out a home-made analogue of a smokehouse for hot smoking.
Smoked bacon ingredients
Smoked bacon recipe
For cooking a Ukrainian cuisine recipe smoked bacon, cut pork belly into layers of approximately 8x25 cm. After the bacon, wash it well and, if necessary, scrape the skin.
In a deep bowl, mix salt with water and put on fire. Bring the saline to a boil, put the bacon in it and cook for 3 minutes.
Chop the onion and garlic, put it in a dish in which the bacon will be salted. On top of garlic and onion, lay the bacon skin down and pour in saline. Cover the pans with a lid and put in salt for 5-7 days.
If, during cooking, the bacon is slightly curtailed, when putting it into a vessel, put a wooden plank or sticks on top of the bacon, cover with a lid and place the load on the lid. Until completely salted, the bacon will straighten.
Salted bacon needs to be removed from the pan, put on a wire rack or suspended and dried. One day is enough to dry the bacon.
Well, that day has come when the bacon can be smoked. Prepare sawdust in advance, preferably from cherry or another fruit tree, and if you can find juniper, you are very lucky.
If bacon is hung with hooks in the smoking shed, it needs to be hooked onto the layers of meat – this way the bacon will hold firmly during smoking. Smoke bacon pretty quickly, take longer to prepare. The aroma of smoked bacon will scatter not only in your apartment, but also in the neighborhood will get. After 1.5-2 hours, the fat will be well smoked. But that's not all.
You do not need to eat smoked bacon right away – you need to cool it, you can even put it in the freezer, and only when smoked bacon cools and change its structure, it can be cut and served.
