Make Bacon at Home and Save Money at the Grocery Store (2024)

FAQs

Is it cost effective to make your own bacon? ›

Is it Cheaper to Make Your Own Bacon? This answer depends on how you source your pork belly and what kind of bacon you compare the cost to. If you've raised and butchered your own hogs, then the cost of your pork belly will be less than what you can buy it for from the grocery store.

If you've cooked up more bacon than you can eat, you can store it in a well-sealed container for five to seven days in the refrigerator before it goes bad. If you don't think you'll be able to eat it in that time, you can freeze cooked bacon for about a month.

If you have an issue with nitrates, you can use regular salt and your bacon will taste fine. Sea salt is generally the best, but the process works with any salt. We will warn you in advance though, if you just use salt, the bacon won't be pink when cured.

A gram scale is typically used to weigh the meat. This weight is then entered into a “cure calculator” that will determine the proper amounts of salt, sugar, and cure #1 according to preset percentages (these percentages can be adjusted for taste). Typically, salt is set at 2% of the meat's weight and sugar at 1%.

You can also vacuum seal the bag to remove all the air if you have this available. Place the bag in the refrigerator and allow it to cure. Allow the pork belly to cure for approximately 7 days. A general rule is to cure your bacon 7 days for every inch of thickness.

Next, look for any signs that the bacon has gone bad. No matter what type of bacon you're purchasing, it should appear pink in color. If the meat looks gray, green, moldy, or otherwise discolored, pass on buying and let the store know! it.

Cooked bacon, however, only lasts four to five days in the fridge. If you can't eat it up that quickly, the USDA says you can freeze it for up to a month. (If you're looking for recipes for your leftover bacon, try our Bacon-Pimiento Guacamole, Classic Southern BLT, or Spring Salad With Berries And Bacon.)

You can keep bacon in the refrigerator at 40 ºF or below for one week. Bacon can also be frozen at 0 ºF for four months (for best quality).

Check the “sell by” or “use by” date on the bacon's packaging, and eat the bacon either before the “use by” date, or no longer than 7 days after the “sell by” date. Examine the bacon for green, gray, or brown discoloration, mold spots, or slimy texture, all of which indicate spoiled bacon.

This recipe, which is adapted from Michael Ruhlman's excellent book Charcuterie, requires the use of pink curing salt #1. You can get by with all kosher or sea salt, but the bacon will look like well-cooked pork (grayish), taste more like salty pork than like bacon, and will keep for only a week in the fridge.

What happens if you don't have curing salt? ›

What is a substitute for curing salt? Celery juice powder and celery powder are natural substitutes for curing salt.

But really, if you were to put a couple handfuls of salt on pork belly and put it in your fridge for about three days and then take it out, rinse it off and dry it and hang it, that would cure, that would cure the belly. Brandon: Pat it dry with towels, after you've rinsed off any salt that remains.

Most bacon today is cured through wet curing. Curing ingredients like salt, sugar, seasonings, sodium nitrate and other chemicals are mixed to create a brine that the bacon is soaked in or injected with. This injection method is called pumping and is the quickest way to cure bacon.

Now take the seasoned pork belly, lay it in a deep glass baking dish. Cover and place in the refrigerator and forget about it for 7-10 days. You can under cure bacon but you can not over cure bacon. So make sure you leave it at minimum a week.

The process of curing involves the addition of nitrites or nitrates and salt to meat to enhance food preservation and reduce bacterial contamination. Nitrites in particular are very effective at killing harmful bacteria such as Clostridium botulinum and Listeria monocytogenes.

Bacon requires curing and/or smoking then slicing and the ridiculous see through packaging. It's the most processed, so it has the most labor, thus the expense. It's the simple law of demand and supply. For example, let me give you an example of a cut of beef that used to be dirt cheap.

Aside from increased seasonal demand, the price hike is caused in part by the implementation of an animal welfare law in California that took effect on July 1.

Bacon: A whole hog will yield about 16 lbs of bacon. You can slice it and fry it fresh as a pork belly or you can have it smoked and cured to make bacon.