I bet anyone reading this far is saying “geez, when is this guy going to get around to smoke and whiskey?” It turns out, right now, in this recipe. This is one of my favorite recipes. I first cured my own bacon in 2016 and I’ve been adjusting and tuning the recipe ever since. This is now a very stable, solid recipe. And it makes for an awesome bacon. Welcome to making your own Maple Whiskey Bacon!

First, A Safety Briefing

Making bacon involves curing meat. The cure does two primary things for us. First, we get to infuse the meat with salty goodness that creates that distinct bacon flavor. Second, we cure the meat with Salt and Sodium Nitrite to preserve it and to kill bacteria, such as Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism. For more information on curing meat, food safety, and a really handy curing calculator, see this article on Amazing Ribs. I strongly recommend you read the entire article before curing any meats.

Please be assured, I read the article I discuss many times over. Professor Blonder, who created the curing calculator in that article, is an eminent (and highly respected) engineer, physicist, and food scientist. I always use his curing calculator when preparing to cure meat. This recipe is based upon standard thickness pork belly and assumes a 3 lb piece of pork. The liquid, time in cure, and amount of salt and Prague Powder #1 is derived from the calculator and will result in safely cured bacon.

IF you are going to do a different size/weight piece of pork belly, you need to adjust the time, liquid, salt, and Prague Powder #1 based upon the curing calculator. If you don’t, you are risking serious illness, visits to the emergency room, and friends and family being very unhappy with you.

On To The Good Stuff: Making Maple Whiskey Bacon

Bacon is made from stomach of the pig … AKA pork belly. You will need to get 3 lbs of pork belly. There are plenty of sources for this. I buy whole bellies at Costco. But you can go to your local butcher, a farmer that raises pork, or online meat providers like Crowd Cow.

Once you have the pork belly, which will generally come in cryovac (thick plastic bag sealed around the meat), you need to prepare the belly and then the cure. Preparing the belly is fairly simple. We are going to remove it from the cryovac, rinse it off, pat it dry, and cut into 3 lb slabs for curing. The pork belly in the pictures on this page was 10.5 lbs. I removed 1.5 lbs to use separately, put that in a ziplock bag and back into the freezer. Then I divided the remaining 9 lbs of belly into 3 equal pieces. I do not do any other trimming.

Now we are going to prepare our brine to cure the bacon. This is really straightforward to do, but there are a couple important things to consider in the process. Salt (including Sodium Nitrite aka Pink Salt) can penetrate meat and work it’s way through the meat. As it does so, it will tenderize and flavor the pork belly.

Other ingredients in the brine are not going to penetrate further than maybe an 1/8″ into the meat, or not at all. So, really, the other ingredients (garlic, pepper, maple syrup, etc) are creating surface flavor and crust on the bacon. Here, we want to amp up the ingredients because they will be entirely on the outside and just a small piece of what you get when you bite a slice of bacon.

All of these ingredients are going to be mixed together with some distilled water. Or water that has been boiled. Basically, we want to prevent bacterial growth during the curing process. It’s obviously highly unlikely in the refrigerator, with all of the salt and Prague Powder, but not impossible. And we are much better off safe than sorry when it comes to going to the ER with food poisoning.

I use 1 gallon ziplock bags to hold my pork belly and brine. A 3 lb piece of pork belly fits snugly in the bag, then we add the brine and seal it and we have a great container to cure our bacon. Just be certain to press all of the air out of the bag as you are sealing it. Lay the bag(s) in something to contain the liquid in case you have a leak. I use a cookie sheet, which easily holds 3 bags of pork belly as they brine.

The pork belly is going to cure for 4 to 7 days. Four days is the minimum necessary for the Prague Powder and salt to fully penetrate and cure the meat. It can go 7 days without a problem at all. Anywhere in that time period, we are going to remove the pork belly from the cure, rinse it off nicely, and then smoke it as the final step of creating bacon. Once smoked, it is perfectly safe to eat immediately. So cut off a slice and try it out. It’s gonna taste great.

Making Maple Whiskey Bacon In Pictures

Maple Whiskey Bacon

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Recipe by Eric Course: BaconCuisine: AmericanDifficulty: Medium

Servings

24

servings

Prep time

20

minutes

Smoking Time

2

hours 

Calories

185

kcal

Curing Time

5

Days

Serving Size

2

slices

Total time

2

hours 

20

minutes

Making your own Maple Whiskey bacon at home. This recipe takes you from raw pork belly through curing it and smoking it and turning your home made bacon.

Ingredients

• 3 lbs pork belly

• 3.5 grams Prague Powder #1 (measure this with a good kitchen scale)

• 4 tbsp Morton’s kosher salt

• 4 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper

• 2 cloves garlic (or 1 tsp minced garlic)

• 3/4 cup distilled water

• 1/2 cup quality maple syrup

• 2 tbsp whiskey …. rye, bourbon, scotch …. whatever is handy in your liquor cabinet. And one oz for the cook!

Method

• Curing the pork belly
• Mix the cure up in a 1 gallon ziplock bag
• Add the pork belly slab to the bag
• Get all the air out, seal it, use your hands to work the cure in on all surfaces of the meat
• Put in the fridge on a cookie sheet (or similar) to contain any leaks
• Turn 2X daily and rub all the cure into the meat when you do
• After 5 days, minimum, and 7 days, maximum, you are ready to smoke the cured meat
• Smoking the Bacon
• Set up your grill/smoker for 2 zone/indirect cooking
• Get the indirect zone to 250F
• Add a few chunks of wood … oak, hickory, ash, apple, mulberry all work well, heavy smoke is good on bacon
• When the smoker/grill is at 250F and the smoke is rolling well
• Add the bacon slab to the indirect zone
• Cook until it is 155-160 internal temp and has a nice crust starting to form
• Pull from the smoker and rest
• Making into bacon
• Cool to fridge temp. You can put put in freezer for 10 minutes to get it cold/firm enough, if you like
• Slice as thin as you can
• Cook as you would any other bacon