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I’ve been experimenting a lot with pork. With dry curing and ageing of my prosciutto in the picker’s hut. With light curing of fresh pork for an hour and making pasta. With roasts and braises and stews and speck. And now, only a few months later than I originally planned, I’ve finally managed to smoke my own bacon from my own pigs.
First up, the cure. While commercially they use brine and big needles to speed up the curing, I make it easier at home; a dry mix of salt and sugar that is flung at the boned out belly and left to draw out moisture and cure the meat. I like the sweetness of sugar, and soon, if the hive allows, I’ll be able to use honey. The honey from a neighbour, who salvaged a swarm that escaped from my hive, was lightly fragrant and tasted of lemon, though there’s not a lemon tree within cooee. Maybe mine will be similarly lively. Next time I might try brown sugar, too, in a recipe for ham I was given by someone in the north of the state.
But this bacon had a simple cure. No sodium nitrate, no saltpetre. Curing and smoking anything, be it fish or meat or tofu, is a matter of taste. I cured mine for most of a week, by mistake. Two days would’ve been enough. You can feel the cure in the meat, the way it changes texture. A long cure means overtly salty meat but I know I can also use mine to flavour other things. A little bit to go a long way.
Next up the smoker. A wonderful old smoker that has been carted around the world. I used sawdust gathered after chainsawing timber for the cooker. Just good old Tassie oak, as it’s known, a gum tree of some kind; very hard wood that won’t leave a resinous taste. Willows, which litter the creek, would be no good. Neither would the pine that lines the pig paddock.
I make a fire in the base and use the smoker’s own rounded tray to hold the sawdust in it. The smoke is mostly from the fire at first, then the sawdust. I just feel my way along, judging how much heat and how much smoke will be produced. The bacon is cut into three and folded over so it will fit on the racks. It sits on two shelves, one close to the fire, one way up high. It doesn’t take too long for the bottom one, thanks to the heat, to unfurl and melt fat into the fire. The flames start to lick the bacon, dripping more fat into the sawdust tray, which, instead of simply smoking, catches alight. Of course, I was feeding chooks when it happened.
So, to cut a long story short, one piece of bacon has quite a crisp skin. And a blackened skin. One piece is singed on an edge, and the final one, the one I decided to photograph, is deeply tanned from a good dose of smoke. The outside is incredibly complex – bold tasting free-range pork laced with the cure and luscious smoke – though the flavour will mature if I leave it to hang for a week. I don’t understand the science of how it changes, it just does.
Soon, I’ll be able to slice my bacon to have with my bread, with my eggs, with my butter. All I need now are some of my heirloom tomatoes to ripen so I can serve those with it, too.
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Comments (21)
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02 Jan 2012 16:53 AEST
From:
Homemade bacon
Could someone please tell me why the powers that be think we need Sodium Nitrate and Saltpetre in our meat and for what purpose.I have started growing my own vegs again after years of tastless vegs and am about to get my new fruit trees. Love your show Matt, love Tassie.
22 Mar 2010 11:01 AEST
From: Marrickville
Pro Bacon, Anti-Pork
I wonder if I'm the only one out there is who love bacon, but doesn't like another sort of pork. There is something special about bacon, and I can only imagine that your homemade bacon is even more alluring for the pork averse.
14 Mar 2010 17:56 AEST
From:
$$
Great show love to watch each week. Just want people to know it's a great lifestyle but you can't give up your day job. Keep up the great shows, good to see someone else battling with the little critters eating the garden. Would be keen on that chorizo recipe myself. A syringe from the local stock feed place is a great substitute for pumping your meat with brine ( tasty bacon, pickled pork and corned meat).
13 Mar 2010 11:05 AEST
From:
Bacon!
Good lord, that bacon looks like heaven!
11 Mar 2010 21:45 AEST
From:
Chorizo recipe
would you please point me to a recipe for chorizo with no chemiacls, the kind you talked about in one of your episodes, thank you PS( the series is fantastic)
05 Mar 2010 11:47 AEST
From:
Great show
Love the show. It's a pity we have produced a population that have been sanitised to basic farming practices and where food comes from. The presentation of aesthetically pleasing products hasn't helped. Practices such as placing a pad in the supermarket meat to soak up blood produce a mentality such as the remark of one of my young adult nephews upon seeing the evenings meal in the fridge on a plate, with a small amount of blood. "I'm not eating that, it's got blood on it." SBS is no. 1.
26 Feb 2010 21:02 AEST
From: Bega
Great Show
We are interested in making salami or a wurst. Do you have any any advice on ingredients?
I’m afraid we’re still playing around with our salami style sausages and have little wisdom to share. We’re hoping to get some instruction from some local Italians, though.
- Matthew Evans
25 Feb 2010 13:02 AEST
From:
Pork products
Is it true that a butcher in Cygnet makes & smokes your pork products or do you make them & sometimes you buy in pork from eleswhere as the show leads me to believe that you grow all your own?
It sounds as if you’re getting a bit muddled in time lines. If you remember the market episode, we talk about buying in our pigs, and in the dairy episode we actually visit the same farm where most of our pigs come from. That’s the same farm where I buy Maggie. I only have two pigs on the show and they aren’t used in any market scenes.
In the market episode we also talk about getting the bacon smoked at a local butcher. You’re probably confusing the television show with the real life market stall for the last couple of months. Our current pigs mostly come from my farm, though we do have some from other local suppliers, including Hans and Esther from Tongola. And yes, because we don’t have our own licensed premises to make bacon and ham, we do still use two local butchers – one in Cygnet and one in Snug, to smoke our products for us.
- Matthew Evans
11 Feb 2010 22:19 AEST
From:
Great Show
Hi Matthew, this is my favorite show on television right now. You are living my dream and have my nine year old glued to the set also. I have vegie gardens on my small town block and hope to be able to upscale and recreate what you bring to our home each week some day. Continue the passion. Thumbs up also to SBS.
11 Feb 2010 20:03 AEST
From: The Hunter
Mick
Keep up the great work.. Mick is doing a fantastic job!!! Fondu at Cradle Mtn.. What more can you ask for?
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About this Blog
Ever wondered what it’d be like to leave a cushy city job and set up a small farm without any experience of rural life? Join Matthew Evans as he adjusts from being a restaurant critic to learning exactly where his food is coming from, on a farmlet in Tasmania’s beautiful Huon Valley.
Matthew Evans was once trained as a chef, before crossing to the dark side of the industry and becoming a restaurant reviewer. After five years and 2,000 restaurant meals as the chief reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, Matthew realised that chefs don’t have the best produce in the land, normal people who live close to the land do. So he moved to Tasmania, to a small patch of earth where he’s raising pigs and sheep, milking a cow and waiting for his chickens to start laying.
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