occupation: SAHM

Because I was still ecstatic over my successful homemade tapa, I felt ready to go up a notch and make another convenience food from scratch.

Homemade bacon.

We’ve all heard of homemade tocino and homemade longganisa, but rarely, if ever, do we hear of someone, anyone, making homemade bacon. So I just have to do it.

I spent hours reading articles on the net about curing your own bacon. There were a few discouraging articles, but I was primed for a challenge. I focused on those that said it was “unbelievably” easy.

With the information swimming in my head, I marched to the grocery to get me some meat.

***

This homemade bacon is a mishmash of the things I read and my improvisation.

I chose to do a basic rub, and so I needed:

A half cup of brown sugar

A half cup of pink salt - which is used for keeping fish and meat, plus its color would make the bacon pink. But as I have never heard of a pink salt prior to this and thus I have no idea where to get it, I settled with half a cup of rock salt.

A half cup of maple syrup - which I also didn’t have. I’m not sure if my maple-flavored pancake syrup will do. I do however, have bottles of honey, so I used it as a substitute.

And a kilo of pork belly. The cooks used a big slab of pork belly, but since I bought mine from the nearby grocery, the belly I got was already sliced into strips.

****

I mixed the first three ingredients.

I rubbed them all over the meat.

Then the meat should be placed inside big Ziplock bags. The ones I have here are sandwich bags, so I had to make do.

The meat was then placed in the refrigerator, where it would stay for seven days. Every two days for the next seven, I had to flip the bags so that the cure would be distributed evenly.

Some water came out of the meat. Some articles say I should drain the bag, others say it’s okay and leave it alone. I chose to do the latter - it was easier. I read so many things I had to “be careful” of when draining the bag so I chose to ignore them instead.

And so on the seventh day, I took out the meat and washed it.

Some articles indicate “forming the pellicle, ” where the meat should be left uncovered in the refrigerator for 24 hours. This is to  make the bacon taste good when smoked.

But my plan was to pan fry the bacon, so I washed the meat and sliced a strip into small pieces. But I left some to form a pellicle, so I’d soon find out if there is any difference in taste.

At this point I realized why it is better to get a slab of pork belly instead of the strips in the grocery. It was hard (for me at least), to remove the skin and to make paper thin slices out of it, the way commercial bacon usually is. And so I had to slice it into small pieces instead, and then I pan fried them.

The cooked homemade bacon looked brown and white, instead of the usual brown and pink. Maybe it would would looked a lot like a commercial bacon had I used pink salt.

Finally, the much-awaited part - the taste test.

It was really, fortunately, good. Salty with a sweet aftertaste.

I half-expected I would be eating fried rotten meat, but no, I assure you, it was good. I’m still writing this blog post, with no hint of going to the bathroom or worse, the emergency room, so I also dare say it’s safe to eat.

Having said that, I admit it tasted a tad too salty. But according to the articles, all I have to do is wash the meat a little more to get rid of the salt.

Hubby liked it, but would like to have it a little sweeter next time. So that means I would have to add more brown sugar and honey on my next attempt.

Also, while it really tasted yummy, I found it odd that it didn’t quite taste like, say, a Purefoods bacon.

Then he exclaimed, “Ham!” Yes, that’s it! The bacon tasted like a Christmas ham.

***

I will make another bacon next time, be a little bolder and try a plethora of spices other than those basic three. Perhaps my bacon will taste like real bacon by then.

If not, at least I’ve learned how to make my own ham for Christmas.