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Feb. 2nd, 2008 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickNot a whole lot of news today.
I picked up my piece of proto-bacon from the meat store today. You know how when you go to the grocery to buy bacon (those of you who buy bacon, anyway) and you flip all the packages over to look at the display strip on the back to find the more-meaty bacon packets? Turns out that the correct course of action for getting a properly meaty bacon is to start by talking to the butcher people at your local meat store. The properly meaty pork belly, apparently, never makes it to the plastic packs in the grocery store. Fo' shizzle.
I have never seen any store-bought bacon as pretty as the piece of pork belly that I brought home from the local meat store. Also, I'm pleased to report that my proto-bacon came with a USDA approval stamp on it in several places. Go, go, USDA! Probably this means I will not die of mad cow disease, which is always a plus.
There are those who suggest, rather strongly, that pigs live a short and unhappy life before being inhumanely slaughtered for our delectation. That's probably true, but at least this particular pig did not live on a huge factory farm in the Carolinas what has sewage lagoons of awesome proportions. This is because nobody in his or her right mind would ship a live hog from the Carolinas to a slaughterhouse in rural Pennsylvania with diesel fuel running at about $3.40 a gallon. I'm not sure where the pig came from, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't terribly far away. As for the shortness and unhappiness of its life and the inhumanity of its demise, well... if pigs weren't so tasty, we would not do this to them. Of course, if they *weren't* tasty, they'd probably be extinct by now from habitat destruction or something.
I took the proto-bacon and I cut it into three reasonably-equal pieces. I smeared each of them with salt and brown sugar (equal amounts) and put each in a gallon ziplock bag in the fridge. If I'd been a planning-ahead person, I would have gotten the 2-gallon ziplocks because they are a bit roomier, but the gallon ziplocks work well enough. By the time the proto-bacon had been in the fridge for the better part of an evening, the sugar/salt (which was a dry powder when I put it on the pork belly pieces) mixture was wet from the moisture that had been drawn out of the proto-bacon.
This is a telling difference between home-made bacon and store-bought bacon. The bacon sold in mass market packets at the grocery store has been injected full of watery brine and soaked in brine to add flavor to it and to preserve it quickly. Also, bacon that has been so treated is rather heavier than "real" bacon. Manufacturers of "juiced" bacon can realize a tidy profit on their saltwaterlogged bacon because all bacon is sold by weight. Real bacon is rubbed with a cure (the aforementioned salt/sugar mix) to draw some of the moisture out of it so that the meat will be less prone to spoiling. Dehydration (which means "taking the water out" -- totally what we are doing with the cure stuff) is a great way to reduce the microbial threat to one's meat. However, instead of me having 8.67 lbs. (or whatever. It's 8.6 something) of bacon when I started with 8.67 lbs. of pork, I will get LESS THAN THAT by the time I am done because I'll have taken some of the water out. Manufacturers of juiced bacon can start with 8.75 lbs. of actual pig meat and wind up with maybe 9 lbs. of "bacon" by way of adding salt water.
Anyway, there will not be much excitement on the proto-bacon front for a week, unless ya'll are the sort that get really excited about flipping the bags of proto-bacon over every other day. I'm not sure I am going to be able to make that interesting for the week that it's going to take.
The next item of major interest that will happen to the proto-bacon will be when I smoke it next weekend.
I picked up my piece of proto-bacon from the meat store today. You know how when you go to the grocery to buy bacon (those of you who buy bacon, anyway) and you flip all the packages over to look at the display strip on the back to find the more-meaty bacon packets? Turns out that the correct course of action for getting a properly meaty bacon is to start by talking to the butcher people at your local meat store. The properly meaty pork belly, apparently, never makes it to the plastic packs in the grocery store. Fo' shizzle.
I have never seen any store-bought bacon as pretty as the piece of pork belly that I brought home from the local meat store. Also, I'm pleased to report that my proto-bacon came with a USDA approval stamp on it in several places. Go, go, USDA! Probably this means I will not die of mad cow disease, which is always a plus.
There are those who suggest, rather strongly, that pigs live a short and unhappy life before being inhumanely slaughtered for our delectation. That's probably true, but at least this particular pig did not live on a huge factory farm in the Carolinas what has sewage lagoons of awesome proportions. This is because nobody in his or her right mind would ship a live hog from the Carolinas to a slaughterhouse in rural Pennsylvania with diesel fuel running at about $3.40 a gallon. I'm not sure where the pig came from, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't terribly far away. As for the shortness and unhappiness of its life and the inhumanity of its demise, well... if pigs weren't so tasty, we would not do this to them. Of course, if they *weren't* tasty, they'd probably be extinct by now from habitat destruction or something.
I took the proto-bacon and I cut it into three reasonably-equal pieces. I smeared each of them with salt and brown sugar (equal amounts) and put each in a gallon ziplock bag in the fridge. If I'd been a planning-ahead person, I would have gotten the 2-gallon ziplocks because they are a bit roomier, but the gallon ziplocks work well enough. By the time the proto-bacon had been in the fridge for the better part of an evening, the sugar/salt (which was a dry powder when I put it on the pork belly pieces) mixture was wet from the moisture that had been drawn out of the proto-bacon.
This is a telling difference between home-made bacon and store-bought bacon. The bacon sold in mass market packets at the grocery store has been injected full of watery brine and soaked in brine to add flavor to it and to preserve it quickly. Also, bacon that has been so treated is rather heavier than "real" bacon. Manufacturers of "juiced" bacon can realize a tidy profit on their saltwaterlogged bacon because all bacon is sold by weight. Real bacon is rubbed with a cure (the aforementioned salt/sugar mix) to draw some of the moisture out of it so that the meat will be less prone to spoiling. Dehydration (which means "taking the water out" -- totally what we are doing with the cure stuff) is a great way to reduce the microbial threat to one's meat. However, instead of me having 8.67 lbs. (or whatever. It's 8.6 something) of bacon when I started with 8.67 lbs. of pork, I will get LESS THAN THAT by the time I am done because I'll have taken some of the water out. Manufacturers of juiced bacon can start with 8.75 lbs. of actual pig meat and wind up with maybe 9 lbs. of "bacon" by way of adding salt water.
Anyway, there will not be much excitement on the proto-bacon front for a week, unless ya'll are the sort that get really excited about flipping the bags of proto-bacon over every other day. I'm not sure I am going to be able to make that interesting for the week that it's going to take.
The next item of major interest that will happen to the proto-bacon will be when I smoke it next weekend.
