Charcuterie and me

So Christmas before last my amazing husband bought me a meat grinder and a book called Charcuterie. I was so excited I read much of it picked out projects and then got busy with the travel agency.....sigh....so this year my goal is to be more balanced.

In a great first attempt at this I am starting my first project out if the book. Bacon! Who doesn't love it.

This book is setup kind of like a cooking course so I am going to try and work my way through the recipes as such.

Lesson one...make a dry cure...complete
Lesson two Bacon

So far this lesson has consisted of finding a butcher that sells pork belly....the first one was asking his supervisor where to get pig stomachs.......luckily I was able to correct the request and was sent to Horst Meats which is a farm that sells such items as they butcher their own.

While waiting on my pork belly I met a nice country looking gentleman who tells me I should only cure it five days or it will be too salty, so....I think I will check it at five days and see.

I have 8 pounds of pork belly so I am going to divide it in half and doone with just the dry cure and one either maple or birch maybe maple habenero ...yummmmmm
This is is what eight pounds of pork belly skin on looks like:

Then in the bag, I used flake salt instead of regular kosher salt...hopefully it will be ok....on has maple syrup in it.

Now I have to wait and tur the bag every other day.