Sunday, February 19 2012

Where There's Smoke . . .

No luminiferous aether was harmed in the making of this picture.

Asthma doesn't seem to bother me any more unless I'm around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.
--Steve Allen

Ah, but today it is neither dogs, nor the kind of smoke that comes from cigars that I wish to discuss. Today I'm smoking meat. To be precise, I'm making bacon (insert rejoinders here.)

Readers may recall such previous meaty efforts as my salami curing blog, and my pork-belly pleasures, as well as numerous anecdotes of me eating slabs of meat the size of Eastern European countries.

Yes, I ate that. All of it. I didn't get this big by accident.

I'm definitely a carnivorously-oriented trencherman--don't get me wrong, I love my veggies, especially as I get older and look to eat a little more lightly. But for me there's nothing that speaks to the pleasures of the table as much as meat does, and as anyone who eats knows, bacon is to meat what pure, refreshing water is to a random pile of hydrogen and oxygen atoms--the synergy of meat, cure and smoke is the thing that brings together the universe into a pure, loving quantum of harmony and porky goodness. Amen.

Ahem.

With these feelings in mind, my wife bought me a present for my birthday this past January, an electric smoker.

Big box of fun!

We were away for part of January, and in between the weather in the rainforest has been execrable--lashing rain, winter storms tossing sediment and driftwood high on the beaches and generally just too poopy for anything to be accomplished outdoors. But with an eye to improving conditions, I started my smoking project last week, with the obtainment and preparation of pork bellies. 

You can smoke anything: in a previous life as a professional cook, I used to make chili by smoking onions and peppers before I used them, and I've eaten smoked tofu (rubbery like tofu! Smoky like smoke!) and had enough smoked salmon in my life to fill a driftnet. But I decided to start with bacon. I already love and work with pork belly on a regular basis, marinating it for a low-slow roast and succulent tenderness. By switching up the marinades you can do some pretty cool things with it, from making Hoisin pork belly (brilliant in stir-fry) or orange-juniper-clove pork belly (great with a little orange glaze as a slider filling).

Accordingly, I toddled off to my usual Chinese supermarket and made off with some lovely pork belly.

 Meat, glorious meat

I proceeded with a curing rub. There are a lot of different options out there, but for bacon the cure is the first step in altering the texture of the meat (by drawing water out of the cells, making the meat softer, and drawing amino acids out of those same cells to the surface where they contribute flavour and aroma. The cure also flavours the meat. This time I chose to do a simple rub of 50/50 salt and brown sugar, with a dab of maple syrup thrown in. Normally one makes a brine which includes water, but I was cross-disciplining here . . . more on this later. I popped the bellies into a vacuum sealed bag and left them in the refrigerator for a week.

The next step was to open up my new toybox and put the smoker together.

Not pictured: cat hiding inside box

Surprisingly simple--an aluminium box with some racks, a drip tray and a pan that sits on a small heating element--it's still elegant and well-made.

The element of surprise

Once I had everything in place I grabbed my now-marinated pork bellies from the fridge.

Denser, richer and a heckuva lot saltier . . .

They had shrunk by about 25%--not surprising, given that they'd given off a couple of cups of liquid. They also had a pleasantly elastic, smooth feel to them, a consequence of the muscle fibres fitting closer together in the absence of all that water.

I then assembled the smoker (thoughtfully covering the drip pan in aluminium foil first) and dropped the rack in.

Easy does it

Then it was time to put the top on, plug it in, and load the pan with chips. This go-round I chose to use Alder wood chips. They have a relatively neutral flavour (unlike Mesquite, Hickory or Apple, all of which I have as well) and I wanted to control for as many variables as possible on my first go-round.

 Getting closer . . .

 I plugged it in, filled the little pan with chips . . .

I've eaten granola that looked like that

 . . . and popped it into the cute little doggie-door in the front.

In you go, boy

After about ten minutes, it started to smoke. Interestingly, it didn't billow out big smoky gusts--just kind of dribbled a little bit as time passed.

Too bad this isn't Smell-o-vision. Mmm!

After about an hour I popped the top off and hauled the freshly smoked bellies out. They smelled absolutely fantastic. and on the outside looked almost as though they had cooked. But they weren't ready to eat!

Sliced open to demonstrate what it looks like under the 'bark'

I popped one slab of my bacon (because that's what it had become) into the convection oven and cooked it at 260F for two hours. When it came out, it looked like this:

Oh baby . . .

Soft, tender and falling apart under the fork, it was gorgeous. I also sliced up one of the raw slabs and Sunday morning I cooked some up with eggs and fried potatoes in the rendered bacon fat (oh, hush: bacon grease is good for you. Everyone should drink a cup every day).

The breakfast of champions! The champion of breakfasts.

 So how was it? In a word, salty. While the texture was excellent, the level of salt that my rub induced was right at the edge of pleasurable eating. No matter: it's fine if you're eating a couple of slices of bacon, and it's utterly perfect in a bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich. The slab I cooked whole is brilliant for flavouring sauteed greens and Chinese stir-fries and cubed it makes great lardons or bacon-bits. I'm going to grind up one of the remaining uncooked slabs along with some pork shoulder and make sausage out of it, which should give excellent flavour.

Now to find other things to smoke!

Posted by Smokey the Tim AT 12:47PM

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