Making Your Own Cottage Bacon

A couple years ago I wrote a blog entry on how to make your own bacon. For a while now, I’ve had the itch to make more. The problem with making bacon is it can be prohibitively expensive.

There is only one place in southcentral Alaska that sells raw pork belly, and they want $3.80 a pound for it. By the time you lose water weight from the cure, take off the pork skin, and buy the ingredients for the cure, you’re looking at bacon that costs close to $7/lbs. While I’ve gone that route before, it sounded too expensive to do again.

Then I found out about cottage bacon. Cottage bacon is simply bacon made from pork shoulder instead of pork belly. It’s leaner than regular bacon, and far cheaper to make. With that in mind, I set off to make my first batch of cottage bacon.

The Process:

1. Get pork shoulder. Costco sells pork shoulder (also called pork shoulder butt). My wife went in to Costco and asked for “pork butt.” After the employee realized she wasn’t kidding, she eventually found my wife the right cut. Boneless, it costs about $1.80 a pound here in AK. The package I purchased was about 15 lbs of pork and consisted of two shoulders. I cut each shoulder into half to end up to end up with four pieces of meat weighing in just under 4lbs a piece.

2. Make and add your cure. Since I had two shoulders, I decided to try two different cures. The important ratios to remember for any cure is the ratio of salt to meat and the ratio of salt to sugar. This will ensure your bacon does not come out too salty or too sweet. For instance, you should have about 12 grams of kosher salt for every pound of meat. Likewise, when adding a sweet taste, such as with maple and brown sugar, your bacon cure should have a sugar to salt ratio of about 2:1.

Below are my cure recipes for 5 lbs of pork. Do the math to adjust as necessary:

Maple and Brown Sugar Cure:

60 grams kosher salt
60 grams of brown sugar
60 grams of maple

Black pepper rub:

65 grams of kosher salt
25 grams sugar
1/3 cup of course ground black pepper (add pepper to rub). After the pork has cured for a week, and you’ve rinsed it, add a layer of pepper onto one side of the pork shoulder, to taste.

3. Let the pork cure for a week. Place the pork in ziploc bags and turn the pork over every day. The salt will draw out some of the liquid in the meat, and flipping it ensures the cure is able to evenly penetrate all parts of the meat.

4. Develop a pellicle. After a week, take to pork out of the bags. Rinse and pat dry. Then leave the pork, uncovered, in the fridge for 24 hours. This will create a sticky coating on the outside of the meat called a pellicle. The pellicle is what “takes up” the smoke flavor.

5. Smoke the bacon at 200F until the internal temperature reaches 150F. You can do this many ways. If you don’t have a smoker, you can add a pan of wet wood chips to a grill, allowing the bacon to take up some of the smoke flavor. Then you can finish it off in the oven at 200F. You can also do all of the smoking/cooking on the grill itself. You just don’t want the temperature to get more than about 200F, or the fat in the bacon will begin to melt. When I smoked the bacon in our home-made smoker, it took about 3 hours to reach 150F internal temperature.

6. Slice, package, freeze, or enjoy! Below you’ll see a picture of my cottage bacon. As you can see, it’s far leaner than regular bacon, and has a taste somewhere in between bacon, pork chops, and ham. It’s amazing…

A Note on Nitrites/Nitrates:

I have some very strong ideas on the use of nitrates and nitrites in meat. I never use them in my bacon or sausage, and have done a fair bit of research on the dangers of nitrites and nitrosamines. I know the quality and care I put into making bacon and sausage, so I feel the nitrites are unnecessary.

However, nitrites are added to cured and processed meats to protect us from many harmful microorganisms, including botulism. Nitrites are sold as “pink salt” or sodium nitrite. If you choose to not use nitrites, you do it at your own risk. It’s a risk my family and I are willing to take, but you must make this decision on your own. Alaska Butcher Supply sells “pink salt.” If you use pink salt, add 12 grams of pink salt per 5lbs of meat, and make sure to reduce your regular salt by those 12g.