After a week of sitting in their respective wet and dry curing brines, it was time to deal with our loin bacon and our belly bacons.  It was decided that I would once again slide over to the Big Dog’s house after work on Friday overnight.  Rolling in at about 8 am, I was greeted with one of Mike’s other culinary passions—home-roasted coffee.  This time out it was a Hawaiian blend that he proceeded to turn into a really tasty latte.  A great way to start (or was this the end?) my day!

After the coffee, it was time to address the issues at hand, most notably, how to finish off these loin bacons and belly bacons?  The first step was to take the cured dry and wet loins and get them into some fresh, cold water and rinse some of the excess saltiness out of them.  For the Berkshire bellies it was not necessary to give them a soak time, but rather, they just needed to be rinsed of any remaining curing rub (1/2 Tenderquick and1/2 brown sugar) and then be patted dry with some paper towel.  They were now ready for some seasoning before smoking.  Hmmmm, we hadn’t really decided on a flavour profile for our belly bacons, so it was time for another  latte refill and to then decide what we wanted to do with the bellies as far as flavouring was concerned.

After some deliberation, we decided that we would split the two belly sides in half, giving us 4 belly roasts to smoke/season.  On two of them we went with a commercial rub that I had brought over that morning.  It was Mary’s Cherry Rub, put out by a woman in the US who has a small, but respected line-up of bbq seasonings.  This would be our ‘sweet’ belly seasoning.

For a stronger, savory belly bacon seasoning, Big Dog suggested a blend of black and pink peppercorns,, which he ground up fresh in a small grinder. Time to apply the rubs to the bellies.

The BackWoods Smoker was just approaching 210°F and the combination of pecan wood as well as the Smokinlicious!Maple and Jamaican Rum woodscuits were just giving off a nice light perfume in the crisp February air.  Time to smoke!  We rigged a length of dowel across the rack supports in the BackWoods and used the new bacon hooks from Butcher & Packer to suspend the bacon slabs in the cooker.  Close the door and time to go back and address those soaked pork loins!

We rinsed the loins (3 from the wet ham brine and 2 from theTenderquick/Brown Sugar curing blend), patted them dry and then started the seasoning decision process all over again!!  We went back to another commercial product that I’d had some success with before; DRBBQ’s Crank it Up! 12 Pepper Blend.  I’d used it on some belly bacon before with some fine results, so this time it went on 4 of the loin bacons; 2 of the wet cured and the 2 dry cured.  The other wet cured bacon got seasoned with a blend of peppercorns, onion granules, garlic granules and some ground lemon peel. We ground those ingredients together and decided it was pretty damn good!

In addition to trying different rubs on the various loin bacons, we also decided to try different cookers for the smoke application.  We’d found that the Bradley Smoker tended to give a greater amount of smoke flavour to the meat we’d cooked in it, given that it had a continuous smoke cycle.  The BackWoods Smoker, on the other hand, tended to give a more subtle level of smoke to the meat cooked in it.  Hey!  Let’s try the different meats in each of the cookers and see what we end up with!  That’s the whole goal of Les Noiracochon, is it not? To experiment with techniques, cookers and cuts of meat in search of the ‘ultimate’ food?

With that in mind, we loaded one of the wet cured Crank it Up! loins,  and a dry cured Crank it Up! loin into each of the cookers, with the Bradley taking the 5th homemade seasoned wet-cured loin, as the BackWoods already had the extra burden of the belly bacons as well.

 The BackWoods got the job done first, having got a little hot while i was distracted by all this meat handling. The bacons came out at 150°F internal, which was a little further along than I had originally planned for, but didn’t seem none the worse for wear, probably due to the extra-thick fat layer on the Berkshire.  The loin bacons in the BackWoods finished shortly behind that and they were also removed to cool.  The Bradley took a while longer, struggling to keep up to temp with the cold wind outside and the healthy dose of meat within. The BackWoods ran in the 230°F range for the cook and brought the meats to temperature in 3-4 hours.  The Bradley worked closer to 185-195°F and that meant a 5-6 hour cook to bring the loins to finished temperature.

The belly bacon and the loin bacon cooled in the garage/hanging cabinet while we did the Berkshire tenderloin ‘throwdown’ and was cool to the touch when we went out and cut it up for ourselves and the other members of the Les Noiracochon group. 

There is a definite difference between wet-cured and dry-cured loin (‘Canadian’ and/or ‘back bacon’, depending on your favoured terminology).  The dry curing results in a ‘tighter’ and more intense product while the wet curing gives a milder and perhaps more‘rounded’ flavour to the final product. Obviously, a wet brine with 6 or 8 ingredients will give this greater depth and roundness of flavor versus a straight Tenderquick/Brown sugar blend dry cure, it only stands to reason. Perhaps a dry rub with more savory ingredients incorporated?  Something to consider.

It will be interesting to hear from the other Les Noiracochon members as to what they think of the various curing brines/smoker results (the Bradley indeed kicked out a far smokier product) and their feedback on the seasoning blends we chose.  Hopefully, we’ll get some of that input from them posted here on the blog in the very near future.  Til then, time to go and fry up some bacon………