Shoulder Bacon

I've had people ask me personally and I've seen the question asked online; why make your own bacon?  That is usually followed by the comment that it is available in seemingly infinite varieties at the grocery store.  It comes down to two reasons, I like making my own stuff and taste.


I started learning how to process an animal some time after I killed my first deer.  I took it to a local meat processor and paid to have it done.  The cost back then was far less than it is now even taking inflation into account.  However, I wasn't pleased with the packaging, how it was cut, and overall workmanship.  The workmanship part was the fact that they hadn't scraped the bone dust off the various cuts.


Fast forward a few  years and I'm an Army Food Inspector trained in conducting red meat inspections to ensure contractual compliance with USDA guidelines.  Part of that training was attending a red meats course that was conducted at the Veterinary Services schoolhouse at Fort Sam Houston.  The main instructor for that class was the head of the Standardization Branch of the USDA.  The course taught us the proper names of the important muscles, the landmarks for dividing the carcass, and how to go from a hanging carcass to retail cuts of meat.


A natural outgrowth was making sausage out of what I killed.  After all, I do use as much as possible of each animal.  Mostly I made bulk sausage for breakfast.  Making other types will be the subject of a separate post.

Shoulder bacon fresh from the smoker

After I retired from the Army and had settled down I got interested in charcuterie.  One of the best references I have found for that is Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.  It has clear explanations of the techniques and reasons behind each type of charcuterie and excellent recipes of many types.  I use the basic bacon cure as found in their book.

I found out a few weeks back that my source for pork bellies was no longer carrying individual bellies and I don't have room for a case of bellies.  Since I was about out of bacon I had to resort to what I had done in the past, use pork shoulder butts.  I bought boneless butts since they were on sale and cheaper than the bone-in butts.  The downside was the plant workers are a little less careful than I'd be removing the blade bone.  I was only able to get one good slab from each butt though I was left with 17 lbs of pork to use to make sausage.

Shoulder with cure and Sriracha sauce applied, ready for the refrigerator

Shoulder with cure applied, ready for the refrigerator

Now comes an experimental part of this production.  After I'd weighed out the cure and rubbed into the smallest slab and had it in the vacuum bag ready to seal I had an idea.  I put about a 1/2 cup of sriracha sauce on each side to help flavor the meat while it cured.  I let it cure for a week and it was ready to smoke.  The bacon was rinsed after pulling out of the cure as usual and dried.  I even rinsed the sriracha bacon because I didn't want the surface to be too salty or the sauce to burn while smoking.  The bacon was smoked using cherry wood to an internal temperature of 150F.  After I brought it in, I rubbed a thin coat of sriracha sauce on each side.  Once that dried I rubbed on a second coat.  Once the second coat dried it was wrapped and put in the refrigerator to chill for a few days.

Sriracha bacon on the slicer

A couple of mangled slices were fried up after all the bacon was sliced.  I will say the sriracha bacon is a keeper.  You don't get much heat but the sriracha flavor comes through with just a hint of heat that builds as you eat more.  After eating her sample, the good wife wanted to know why I hadn't done this before.

Sliced shoulder bacon

As a disclaimer, I'll add that adding sriracha to bacon is not original with me.  I first saw it in commercial bacon when we were visiting our son when he lived in Kansas City.  That bacon looked like they'd just squirted some sriracha sauce on top of the sliced bacon before they sealed the package.

I vacuum seal my bacon to hold the cure close to the meat.  This is not necessary to make bacon at home.  All you need is a Ziploc bag and a pan to put it in.  The difference is that with the Ziploc bag you'll need to flip the bacon daily to ensure good contact with the cure and resulting brine.  If you don't have a smoker you can either add a bit of liquid smoke to it as it cures or forego the smoke and just cook it low and slow in the oven until it reaches 150F.  If you have a grill, you can set it up for indirect cooking and use it as a smoker.  I've done that many times.  There are some good videos on Youtube showing you how to make your grill a smoker.

Give making your own bacon a try.  You'll be amazed at the difference in flavor.  Plus, you can experiment with different flavor combinations to suit your tastes.  If you make it, let me know how it came out.

Uncle T