wiredfool

Only 2 short years ago, we were vegetarians. Now there’s 40 lbs of pork in the outside fridge curing into bacon and ham.

We’ve got one ham going, roughly 20 lbs on the bone, which was half of the back leg of the half pig that we got. It’s big. It’s a huge chunk of meat. And it’s curing in the Cider Cure from Hugh Fernley Whittingsworth’s Meat book. It’s likely go go something like 30-40 days in the cider and brine, then it will be hung to dry for a while.

We’re doing 2 different styles of bacon, one is the basic dry cure from Hugh’s book, with mostly salt, a little sugar, and some spice. It needs to be re-rubbed every day or so, so it’s a bit more work. The other one is a wetter, maple, sugar and salt cure Basic fresh Bacon from the Charcouterie book. These will go a week to 10 days — the dry cure one is already looking firmer, the wet one is going a little slower.

The cats were terribly interested in what was going on in the kitchen while this was in progress. Thankfully, no bacon was lost to cats, nor was any bacon taped to them.