They say the third time is the charm, and so it was!
I was under a deadline to have some bacon ready before I went out of town for work. Most of the recipes I found took a week or longer to cure, so they were out. So I went back to my first recipe that showed a lot of promise but made a couple small tweaks:
- I dropped the salt down to 1 cup (instead of 1.5 and added about 3 tbsp of smoked salt for flavor)
- I cured the slab for 3 days instead of 4
After a gentle rinse, partial freeze, cut and cook, we had success! The kids actually ate it up and the bacon wasn’t too salty. We could easily tweak this recipe to add a little more maple syrup to sweeten the flavor. We’re also looking to pan fry the bacon in a cast iron skillet, instead of the oven method, to see if it changes the flavor of it at all.
Here’s the final recipe:
- 2 quarts water
- 2 cups maple syrup
- 1 c kosher salt
- 3 tbsp smoked salt (optional)
- 6 peppercorns
- 1 onion, cut into quarters
- 2 sprigs fresh rosemary
- 6 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed
Give this a whirl and see what you think! Next up is a “paste cure” that uses a bourban and brown sugar. I can’t wait!