Bacon

Mr_Singleton

What's cooking bacon? Guanciale? Again easy to make and sublime cubed in a carbonara.

A slightly thicker home cured bacon is going to be light years ahead in taste & texture of the rubbish they sell at the supermarket and a tonne cheaper to boot.

Edit: have you ever had a home cured or top quality bacon out of interest? and I don't mean the so called 'premium' stuff from supermarkets.

caronc

Pollycat wrote: »

I have a set of very good knives (and a sharpener) but I wouldn't be able to cut your home cured bacon to a thinness that I'd find useful - I tend to use bacon in sandwiches or buy the cooking bacon for liver, bacon & tomato casserole.
But maybe other posters would find your suggestion useful.

A few years ago I was given a slab of rather lovely dry cured bacon. I have good knives but no slicer and knew I'd struggle to slice thin rashers. I found on a website (sausagemaking.org I think?) a tip to freeze it for a couple of hours then slice breadth-wise rather than lengthways. It worked really well and although the slices were small they were thin and cooked beautifully. It was a bit of a faff though and I think unless you have or want to buy a slicer or don't mind thick slices probably easier to find a good sliced butchers bacon option.

unrecordings

Finding all this very interesting, yet downright annoying. If I could physically manage it, I'd maybe look at an old bean slicer and soup it up a bit though if I was that keen there must be a lot of used rotary slicers out there for cheaps. I was just getting into this stuff a few years ago, got myself a cheap smoker (& herb garden is quite extensive anyway) but ended up on chemo that precluded the chemicals produced by curing, smoking, pickling, in fact pretty much any preserving

that said, lardons sound do-able

Mr_Singleton

unrecordings wrote: »

that said, lardons sound do-able

Lardons are cubed bacon.

Pollycat

Mr_Singleton wrote: »

What's cooking bacon? Guanciale? Again easy to make and sublime cubed in a carbonara.

A slightly thicker home cured bacon is going to be light years ahead in taste & texture of the rubbish they sell at the supermarket and a tonne cheaper to boot.

No.
Not guanciale.
That would be far too fatty for the dish I'm referring to.

sooty&sweep wrote: »

However some supermarkets do sell packs of bacon misshapes & quite often it's big chunks left from when they've sliced it & that's great for chopping into pasta sauces etc

Jen

^^^^
I only buy it when I can see there are thick pieces in the packet.
Otherwise my liver, bacon & tomato casserole would become liver, bacon & tomato casserole sans bacon.

Mr_Singleton wrote: »

Edit: have you ever had a home cured or top quality bacon out of interest? and I don't mean the so called 'premium' stuff from supermarkets.

No.
I haven't had home cured bacon.
But I do buy my bacon that I use for sandwiches from a 'proper' butcher or farm shop.
I don't have it very often so don't see the point in buying inferior quality (or faffing around with curing my own).

unrecordings

Mr_Singleton wrote: »

Lardons are cubed bacon.

yep - easier to slice up

PipneyJane

Mr_Singleton wrote: »

Just seen this but very easily..... basically get a good slab of belly pork, rub in your cure, place in ziploc bag in the fridge turn it every morning and after x days wash off cure and back into dry in the fridge with out ziploc bag. BACON!!!

Yes, there is a bit more to it ie what cure you use the amount of time etc etc but it really really isn’t hard. Look at the river cottage website for some ideas.

Thank you, Mr Singleton, I will. I'm intrigued.

- Pip

pattypan4

whoever mentioned waitrose streaky, a big thank you. I bought a pack and have enjoyed the nicest couple of slices that I have ever tasted, was superb with an egg, mushrooms and tomato. The bacon made all of it taste amazing