Thu 20 Jun 2013 | 
Email to friend
Print
Enlarge text
- 24 Comments | Join the discussion
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.
top
Blog Home 
Comments (24)
Previous 10 |
05 Apr 2013 17:34 AEST
From:
bacin
Mathew, I make a brine mix for my bacon which is 2kg of coarse salt,2kg Brown sugar to 20 litres of water. I pump the meat with this then leave it in the coolroom in the brine for 48hrs I then hang it for a day to dry then smoke it. My hot smoker is made from 2x18 gallon kegs with the burner on the outside which heats the bottom of the keg and ignites the woodchips and creates heat and smoke but not very hot. I have a vented fat catcher in the bottom to stop the fat burning. Cheers.
27 Mar 2013 16:58 AEST
From:
Hats off
You should be congratulated Matt. We too have a small holding and we have enjoyed our own bacon and prosciutto. It's hard to do, taking risks, interpretation of advice, the gore, and above all the very real affection for the Pigs. P1 and P2 in our case ( we never eat an animal with a name ). They ate grain, grape skins and apples, a fine life they lived on our acre, occasionally the neighbours land, We ate them. All. In fact there is a leg of P1 waiting for pea and ham soup in the freezer.
07 Sep 2012 17:58 AEST
From:
Kingfisher Cottage
Love your show ! I am at the opposite end of Aus to you but also trying to live a more sustainable healthy life. We have 10 acres of virgin bush that we are slowly developing. I have a great vegie garden although almost at the end of the productive time up here as humidity is setting in. Corn & potatoes almost ready & lettuce,tomatoes,beans have been going for months now. Also have my own chickens, pigs & 1 cow - what are the percentage/quantities for sugar/salt for your bacon cure.
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
Join the discussion
PLEASE NOTE: All submitted comments become the property of SBS. We reserve the right to edit and/or amend submitted comments. HTML tags other than paragraph, line break, bold or italics will be removed from your comment.
Most Popular
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.
Other Blogs
TV
- Living Black
- Italian Food Safari
- Thalassa
- Luke Nguyen's Vietnam
- Behind the Scenes: The 2009 Deadly Awards
- My Family Feast
- Costa's Production Blog
- Eurovision 2011
- Swift and Shift Couriers
- Global Village
- My Bogan Diary
- The Road to the White House
Food
Films
Documentary
- Britt Arthur
- Catharine Lumby
- John Birmingham
- Rory Medcalf
- Mark Jones
- Emily Booth
- Bob Wurth
- Andy Martin
World News Australia
Sport
- The Circus
- The Interchange
- The Hangover
- Lip Service
- Deep in the Dust: On the Dakar trail
- Dakar Dreams
- The Finktank
- Open Season
About SBS
Business
Internet and Technology
Cycling Central
- Joe Ward
- Tom Palmer
- Bridie O'Donnell
- Sarah van Boheemen
- Stuart Randall
- Rochelle Gilmore
- Matthew Price's Broom Wagon
- Anthony Tan's Velo Files
- Matthew Keenan
- Kate Bates
- Al Hinds
- Philip Gomes
- Scott Sunderland
- Mike Tomalaris
Festival Reports
Tour De France
