Home-cured bacon: the results

So, after 5 days sitting around in the rub it's time to taste...

I took the bacon (yep, bacon, no belly now!) out and gave it a good rinse to remove all the rub. You can see from the picture just how dark it looks after five days.

Using a very sharp knife it was possible to cut some reasonably thin slices - probably twice the thickness of a standard rasher. All adds to the home-made feel, I think! What's more, they did actually look like bacon rashers!

Of course, no point in waiting to try... so into the frying pan. I used a little butter here but really there's more than enough fat on the rashers to just shove them in. Smelt like bacon too...

And finally! A proper, home-made bacon sandwich (well, OK, I didn't make the bread. Next time).

The bacon tasted pretty damn good in my opinion :) Perhaps a little too salty - possibly I rubbed the cure in a little too powerfully? Or maybe one day less? Apparently you can remove some of the saltyness by soaking the bacon for a while in cold water, but I've decided to just risk the heart on this occasion. Mmm, tasty.

Bread dilemma

Top questions to establish:

Is it culinary sacriledge to toast a fresh loaf of bread?

Should you butter the toast when it's hot, leaving it for a moment, so the butter melts into the toast? Or should you butter the toast when it's cold, having recovered from the strains of the toaster in a toast rack?

Should you keep your bread in a bread bin, or in the fridge, or in the freezer?

Do you slice bread thick or thin? Do you slice it differently when you're slicing it for toast?

How far are you allowed to toast bread? Should it still be soft in the middle, or crunchy all the way?

Are you allowed to toast a "continental, crusty" loaf?

Home-cured bacon: Days 2 – 5

Bit of a delay on posting this - didn't have my camera lead! Anyways, enough of my forgetfulness and on with the bacon...

Days 2 – 5 are a bit repetitive, so I'm only posting this once! Basically, I removed the bacon from fridge. There was a fair amount of dark liquid sitting at the bottom (see picture): excellent, the process is working! The belly also started looking more bacon-like, even after just 24 hours. Apparently, if there's not much liquid, your fridge might be too cold - try a cold room like a pantry instead.

I drained off the liquid and the really wet salt at the bottom. Then I took more of the rub and, well, rubbed it in. Then back to the fridge (with the weights on top) for another 24 hours. By the time it got to day 5 it was soo tempting to tuck in, but I waited... results coming soon!

Lemon chicken and chocolate strawberries

Lazy weekends seem to be the best time to mess about in the kitchen, and this one proved no exception. I am not very good at recipes – I hate carefully measuring things in the kitchen and am not very organised, so I wandered around waitrose until inspiration came over me, in the form of some free range chicken legs and thighs (I always buy free range or organic chicken and eggs when I can; the inside of a battery farm is one of my more disturbing memories). I thought simple would be good, so this is what I tried:

Lemon and herb chicken
4 chicken legs (or 8 thighs), with the skin on
2 onions
1 lemon
4 or 5 cloves of garlic
A bunch of basil and a bunch of flat-leaved parsley
Olive oil
Butter
Some sherry

I put the chicken in a bowl with a good few dollops of olive oil, the zest of the lemon, a squeeze of lemon juice and half the herbs, roughly chopped. I seasoned it lightly, mushed it all together with my hands, and let it sit whilst I prepared the rest of the ingredients. I put the oven on hot (200 oC at least), then crushed and finely chopped the garlic, then loosely chopped the 2 onions. I also sliced up half the lemon into 8 or so chunks.

I put a heavy frying pan on full heat with some more oil, then once it was hot, I seared the chicken pieces for 5 or so minutes, until it was getting brown on each side and the herbs were burning. I put them in a pyrex dish just big enough for them, and put them in the oven whist I made the sauce.

Turning the heat down a touch, I put in the garlic, and added the onions before the garlic started browning. I added a lump of butter to keep it all frying. Once the onions were looking translucent, I deglazed the pan with a good slosh of sherry, maybe as much as a wine glass. I then threw in most of the rest of the herbs, leaving a few for the end, and the chunks of lemon. After letting it boil for a minute I poured the mixture over the chicken in the oven, and added enough hot water from the kettle to ¾ cover the chicken pieces, and returned the dish to the oven. 20 minutes later, when the top of the dish was starting to burn, and the liquid was bubbling, I covered it in foil and left for another hour.

I served the chicken, then finished the sauce with another knob of butter, the rest of the herbs, and a squeeze of lemon juice. We had it with jacket potatoes, garlic mushrooms and sugar snap peas, but it would also be excellent with creamy mash or some couscous. It was pretty good, the chicken taste remained, but with a basil, lemon flavour, and the sauce was pungent and tangy, which went well with a stodgy potato. I think you could also add some sort of veg to the sauce and make it more of a stew without much difficulty, and a couple of spices would turn it into something rather Moroccan, so I think I will try this one again!

Chocolate dipped strawberries
100 grams of good, dark chocolate (we used lindt)
25-30 ripe, washed and dried strawberries.

The other culinary delight was not down to me at all, but the lovely Rebecca. Seeing Godiva (an excellent chocolate shop) had strawberries dipped in dark chocolate, but unwilling to pay £5.60 per 100 grams (about 3 strawberries) she made her own, with ripe strawberries dipped in chocolate just melted in a bowl over boiling water. They looked most elegant dipped ¾ into the chocolate, with the stalk and a flash of red flesh still visible. After letting them set on greaseproof paper, they were done. They were incredible, but the leftovers were not as good; the fridge made the strawberries too cold and the chocolate too brittle. Definitely for room temperature! She made about 25 for £4 of ingredients, about 30 times cheaper than Godiva!

Arkansas BBQ sauce

So, I decided to do justice to those ribs left over from the home-cure bacon belly in the classic American fashion. I found this recipe for "Arkansas BBQ sauce" through the magic of Google and did a little editing to come up with (in more standard units):
• 120ml water
• 85g brown sugar
• 90ml Worcestershire sauce
• Large tablespoon Dijon mustard (or slightly more American mustard if you have) (or very much less English mustard!)
• 60ml tomato ketchup
• Teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1 fresh red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped
• 700ml red wine vinegar (yes, this is a lot!)
• 250ml white wine
• A pinch of salt (NOT the 85g in this recipe!)

Shoved everything in a NON ALUMINIUM pan, brought to the boil and simmered pretty strongly for about 45 minutes. The ketchup seemed to go white and clumpy at the start, which wasn't pretty, but sorted itself out. I did make the mistake of breathing in the pan fumes to see what they smelt like. Don't try this... the vinegar is rather potent!

It didn't reduce as much as I had thought, but what the hell - maybe I'll try simmering for longer next time. Put the ribs in a (again, not aluminium) oven dish, poured over the BBQ liquid and marinaded for about an hour. Not strictly necessary, but probably improves the flavour. Then in the oven at about 180 degrees C for 45 minutes, turning once.

Quite a lot of liquid remained at the end. Ribs were very tasty (perhaps a little vinegary), if I say so myself - not massively sticky, but certainly BBQ.

Home-cured bacon: Day 1

By far my favourite food writer is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and by far my favourite food book his excellent The River Cottage Meat Book. It therefore seems appropriate that the first bit of food exploration that I babble on about here is inspired by that very book: home-cured bacon.

It turns out that making your own bacon (I'm not talking in euphemisms here, by the way) isn't particularly difficult. In fact, for me the most difficult part was finding five straight days where I knew I could devote ten minutes to the hunk of meat. Days finally found, it was off to the butchers...

£11 bought me more or less a whole belly of pork. Actually, I'm not positive that this is a whole belly - from descriptions of belly size, I was expecting something a little longer (more 1m than the 60cm this approximated to). Certainly enough to get started on though. A small effort to remove the bones (which went on to be some pretty tasty BBQ ribs - more another time) and a slice across the middle to product two roughly square belly pieces and it was ready for the cure.

For the cure, I followed Hugh's lead and combined:
• About a kilo of sea salt
• 200g brown sugar
• a few finely chopped bay leaves (I used fresh, but dried should do)
• a dozen or more crushed juniper berries
• about 25g ground black pepper

Lots of recipes also include a couple of spoons of saltpetre, which I didn't have. Not compulsory, but if you wish I've subsequently found a fair bit of information on this page.

Important to note that you shouldn't use a metallic bowl at any point: the salt will wreak havoc.

I rubbed a few handfuls (not all!) of the cure into the belly pieces - I had to rub quite hard to get it to really stick. Note this is a messy process - do outside, or at least over a sink! Then stack the belly pieces on top of each other in a (non-metallic!) container; I was really classy and went for the washing up bowl.

All that was left was to weight down the bellies to help squeeze out that belly-bacon separating liquid. Branston Baked Beans (sorry, Heinz - your taste really doesn't stack up) and a couple of tins of Baxters Mushroom Potage provided the necessary mass and the whole thing disappeared into the fridge... until day two.

A quick introduction

Very briefly, and hopefully from not too far up my own arse: I'm hoping that this blog will allow myself and a few others to record some 'hopefully tasty' recipes, recommendations and facts for friends, family and others who may stumble across it.

Actually, that about sums it up. Enjoy!