Cole Cooks: Big Green Egg Smoked Bacon Recipe
Our Big Green Egg is back in action for 2019. For the New Year, my first smoking project was smoking bacon. This is my Big Green Egg Smoked Bacon recipe.
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If you don’t know about the Big Green Egg check out our overview for general Big Green Egg tips
If you don’t have a Big Green Egg don’t worry. You can cook this bacon on any smoker or even a grill with a smoker box. This recipe is surprisingly easy, and the bacon is much better than store bought.
As with any recipe I carefully researched both cooking bacon at home and cooking bacon on a Big Green Egg. The three main resources I used were Nibble Me This, Big Green Craig and Amazing Ribs.
Meathead of Amazing Ribs takes a very scientific approach and I am a fan of both his website and book. Nibble Me This actually suggests using his recipe with a modification to add some bourbon. So, I went and got a fifth of Jim Beam (finishing the leftover bourbon was no problem).
The most important thing about making bacon at home is properly curing it. You need the proper pink curing salt, aka Prague Powder. It was stressed by multiple sites that it is NOT pink Himalayan salt. I got mine from our local Savory Spices. It costs under a $1 an ounce. 1 ounce (6 teaspoons) is enough to cure about 18 pounds of meat. In other words, don’t order a lot of this stuff at once.
Amazing Ribs has a detailed article about curing meats. This is definitely suggested reading. The method I used was a wet brine where you add the curing salt to a liquid at let it brine for as much as a week (I did 5 days).
Pork belly comes in many sizes. I bought a 7-pound pork belly from Costco and cut in half. I was able to get a belly that already had the skin removed. If the skin is on you should remove. Meathead says this can be a pain, so I definitely wanted a skinless belly. At under $3 a pound this was a great deal as there is almost no waste.
There is a great calculator at Amazing Ribs that tells you how much curing salt to use. Apparently, if you double the amount of meat you can’t just double the amount of curing salt. You enter the desired sodium nitrate level (between 100 to 200, I went with 150 ppm), the meat weight, the amount of liquid in the recipe, the thickness of the meat and the shape (flat or tube). This gives you the amount of curing salt you need and the minimum curing time.
My two 3-pound pork bellies were about 1.5 inches thick and I was using 1.25 cups of liquid (maple syrup, water and bourbon). That equaled 0.7 teaspoons which I rounded up to 3/4. The minimum curing time was 3 days.
It looked like Nibble Me This also bought a pork belly from Costco and cut it in half. They did two recipes, one with a maple bourbon rub and one with a molasses bourbon rub. Sounds good to me so that is what I did.
On the day you cook the bacon (after 5 days in my case), you need to rinse off as much of the curing salt as possible. My issue was similar to what Nibble Me This found. It was hard to get everything off. I listened to their advice and didn’t sweat it.
Getting the Big Green Egg to a temperature between 200 to 250 is not too difficult but you need to be careful. Once it gets around 200 you need to cut off air flow right away. If it goes beyond 250 you will have a hard time bringing it down.
Cutting off the air flow involves closing the top and bottom vents all the way. Sometimes this will extinguish the fire and you need to relight it. However, relighting and bringing it back up to temperature is much easier than lowering it.
Ideally, you want to keep the temperature around 225, but I think as long as you are under 250 you should be fine. Nibble Me This suggests 200 degrees, but that low temperature is really hard to maintain.
Of course, to get the smoke you need to add wood chips. I soaked cherry chips in water for a half hour and add them right before putting the meat on. I have also used apple chips. At this point, you need the convEGGtor accessory. This is a plate you set below the grill to allow for indirect cooking. It is pretty much required for any low heat smoking. This is not a cheap accessory, but as I mentioned in my overview, I was able to get it included in the initial purchase.
The pork cooks on the grill until it reaches an internal temperature of 150 degrees. We use our trusty instant read Thermapen. As the recipes suggested it took right about 2 hours.
When it reaches temperature, remove it from the grill and wrap in plastic wrap followed by aluminum foil. Amazing Ribs says to not directly wrap the bacon in aluminum foil. Refrigerate the bacon.
When it is cool you are ready to slice it. I like to only slice it off as needed. You can try different thicknesses. Refrigerate what you don’t use for up to 2 weeks. At that point, you can freeze it for up to 3 months.
The bacon slices cook just like regular bacon. I have tried cooking them in the microwave, cooking in a skillet and cooking it on a rack in 400-degree oven for about half an hour. The oven method is used if you want to make candied bacon. Check out our recipe.
Big Green Egg Smoked Bacon Recipe
Ingredients
- 3 pounds pork belly skin removed
- 2 tablespoon kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon ground black pepper
- 2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 3 tablespoons brown sugar
- 1/2 cup maple syrup or molasses
- 1/2 cup water
- ¼ cup bourbon
- 3/4 teaspoon pink curing salt
Instructions
- Combine all ingredients in a large plastic bag or storage container. Add pork belly and fully cover with mixture. Seal and place in a refrigerator for 3 to 8 days.
- On the day of cooking remove the belly from the refrigerator and wash off as much of the cure as you can. Setup the Big Green Egg or smoker for indirect cooking. Bring the temperature to between 200 and 250 degrees. Right before adding the meat add soaked wood chips.
- Cook meat on grill until the internal temperature reaches 150 degrees. This will take about 2 hours. Remove from grill, wrap in foil and refrigerate. Slice bacon as you use it. After two weeks freeze for up to 3 months.
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