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.