Maple Espresso Bacon
I don't find this bacon really needs to cold smoke when ready, but a few hours wont hurt it if, like Mrs Frank, you don't see the point of unsmoked bacon!
Equipment
- 1 Ziplock bag or more as required
Ingredients
- 1 lump Meaty pork belly or loin for back bacon
- 2.75 % Salt
- 0.25 % Cure #1
- 0.25 % Ground pepper
- 0.2 % Ground cinnamon
- 0.2 % Ground coriander
- 0.2 % Ground ginger
- 0.2 % Ground nutmeg
- 2 % Strong ground coffee
- 1 drizzle Maple flavoured syrup
Instructions
- Before you begin, skin and bone the meat as necessary, then consider cutting the pork up into manageable pieces. I prefer to do lumps that fit into a gallon sizes ziplock bag - usually 2 x 1.5kg bits from a 3kg lump
- Mix all the dry ingredients together to make the cure and coat the meat.
- Carefully drop the meat into a bag and drizzle a generous amount of maple syrup over it and carefully massage the syrup to coat.
- After a day or so the cure will go wet and slushy, this will start to brew the coffee!
- Turn every day for a fortnight - congrats, your pork is now bacon!
- Wash off the cure under a cold tap - or if you prefer a big jug of cold coffee - and pat dry. The idea is to gently rinse off the cure sludge rather than scrub the meat clean!
- Keep it on a cake rack in the fridge for a couple of days to dry out a bit, put the rack over a a tray or plate with some salty water and keep the fat side up, and ideally loosely cover with a bit of baking paper or peach paper - this creates a microclimate that should help avoid it developing a hard outer that can be a problem in modern frost free fridges.
- Wrap in peach paper (like a non-waxy butchers paper) and leave to mature in the fridge for at least another week. We want the bacon to lose a bit of moisture and for the flavour to develop.