Made our first attempt at making our own bacon, and it turned out great! This was made Mustachian by the fact that we inherited the smoker, which looked like it had never been used. FIL apparently bought it, possibly well over a decade ago, and MIL was never going to use it at this point. DH mentioned that we had gotten some pork belly as part of a pork share, and wanted to figure out how to smoke it. His brothers either have smokers already or don't need them so she was happy to get it out of her garage! We also happened to have a bunch of crabapple branches we had trimmed awhile back, so had some "apple wood".
I thought this was going to be one big disaster. First, we didn't cure it for as long as we were supposed to (~12 hrs rather than 5 days). Then, the smoker temp went all over the place during the smoking-too high, too low, etc. And, we wound up with a bit of a grease fire because the catch was not set up right. In the end, though, the bacon tasted GREAT. Also, we did not burn anything down.
A small thing compared to many others' accomplishments, but I was very pleased by the fact that even totally screwing it up and having no idea what we were doing, we wound up with many pounds of bacon far better than anything we could buy. This stuff is like $9/lb at a specialty butcher shop! It's probably at least 10lbs of bacon, now frozen in small batches! Even better, we have a few other years' of the pork belly share now thawing in cure and ready for next weekend's repeat (and probably, improvement)!
