Making Bacon

For a number of years, I had watched several TV cooking shows that used pork belly and the recipes all looked great.  My  grocery store does not carry pork belly and when I asked, they couldn’t even order it (Unless I wanted to buy a pallet of it !!)

But a small local store near me was able to order a 3 pound piece of pork belly for me.

So I picked picked up my pork belly.  I had never purchased pork belly before but $3.20 a pound seemed to be a fine price.

I had looked at a number of online directions for homemade bacon, and they all seemed to be about the same.

Rosemary

Thyme

Black Pepper

Coarse salt

All the ingredients get rubbed on to the pork belly.

The seasoned pork belly goes into a zip style plastic bag.

The pork belly stayed in the bag and in the fridge for seven days, and was turned over once a day.

I rinsed the pork belly off in the sink and patted it dry.

The oven was heated to 200 degrees and cooked until the internal temperature was 150 degrees.

Once fully cooled, I moved it to the cutting board.

Skin side up.

You can see how thick the skin was.

The skin was removed and used later in making soup.

The pork belly gets wrapped in wax paper and refrigerated.

I actually waited a day before I attempted to cut it and cook it.

I was surprised with my patience !!

So nice thick slabs of fresh, homemade bacon !!!

Into the cast iron frying pan.

Hey, it looks like bacon !!!

But that’s were the disappointment hit me.

It didn’t taste like bacon at all.  It just tasted like salted pork

So, I cut a few more slabs.

Into the frying pan again and it still didn’t taste like bacon.

I even tossed some of it on the grill and it just tasted like pork.

That’s what was left.

I cubed it up and into the frying pan.

This ended up going into my split pea soup and it was very good.  But it didn’t taste like bacon !!

OK, so what did I do wrong or what do I need to do different to make it the next time and make it taste like bacon??