The Art of Hot Smoking Bacon: A Guide to Achieving Perfect Flavor and Texture

When it comes to cooking bacon, many people rely on traditional methods such as baking or pan-frying. However, for those looking to take their bacon game to the next level, hot smoking is a game-changer. By infusing bacon with the rich flavors of smoke, hot smoking adds a depth and complexity that can't be replicated by other cooking methods.

In this article, we'll explore the process of hot smoking bacon, from preparing the equipment to enjoying the finished product. We'll also discuss various aspects of hot smoking, including temperature, wood chips, and curing brines.

**Preparing for Hot Smoking**

To begin with, it's essential to prepare the equipment necessary for hot smoking. This includes a smoker, such as an electric coil smoker, and wood chips. Wood chips are used to produce smoke, which adds flavor to the bacon. The type of wood chip used can vary depending on personal preference, but common options include hickory, apple, and cherry.

For this experiment, I chose to use hickory wood chips. To prepare the smoker, I placed the wood chips in the smoker's heating element. This would produce smoke, which would then infuse the bacon with its characteristic flavor. The temperature of the smoker is also crucial, as it can affect the outcome of the hot smoking process.

To avoid burning the fat, I set the temperature to 200°F (90°C). This low temperature allows the bacon to cook slowly and evenly, ensuring that the fat remains intact while absorbing the flavors of the smoke. By controlling the temperature, you can achieve a perfectly smoked piece of bacon with a delicate balance of flavor and texture.

**The Smoking Process**

With the equipment prepared, it's time to place the bacon in the smoker. I carefully placed a slab of bacon on the smoker's tray, making sure not to touch any other components of the setup to prevent contamination. The curing brine used for this experiment included salt, sugar, and other ingredients that contribute to the characteristic flavor of hot smoked bacon.

The smoking process is relatively slow, taking several hours to complete. During this time, I monitored the temperature and smoke levels to ensure a consistent experience. The smoker's electrical coil heated the wood chips, producing a gentle flow of smoke that wafted through the air.

After a few hours, the bacon had achieved the desired level of smokiness, which was confirmed by its color change from pale to a rich brown hue. I removed the bacon from the smoker and allowed it to cool before slicing it into thin strips.

**Slicing and Serving**

With the hot smoked bacon now ready for consumption, I turned my attention to slicing and serving. The process is relatively straightforward, as I used a deli slicer to achieve uniform thickness. However, I also experimented with hand-slicing a few pieces of bacon to compare their texture and flavor.

The results were striking: both methods produced deliciously crispy and flavorful bacon, but the sliced variety had a slightly different texture. The thin slices crinkled up more than the thicker ones, creating a satisfying crunch that added depth to each bite. I also noticed that the hand-sliced pieces retained a bit more moisture, which complemented their smoky flavor.

**Cooking the Bacon**

Now that we have our sliced bacon ready, it's time to cook it. For this experiment, I opted for frying in a cast-iron skillet. The secret to achieving crispy bacon lies in cooking it within its own fat. This allows the fat to render and crisp up, creating a satisfying texture that's hard to replicate with other methods.

To start, I heated the skillet over medium-high heat, then carefully placed the slices of bacon into the sizzling pan. I avoided flipping the bacon too frequently, as this could cause it to burn or become greasy. Instead, I let it cook for a few minutes on each side, allowing the fat to render and the bacon to crisp up.

As the bacon cooked, the aroma filled the air, tantalizing my taste buds with promises of rich, smoky flavors. Finally, after a few minutes of cooking, I removed the bacon from the skillet and placed it on a cooling rack to let the excess fat drip off. The result was crispy, golden-brown bacon that added depth and complexity to any dish.

**Conclusion**

Hot smoking bacon is an art form that requires patience, attention to detail, and a willingness to experiment. By understanding the principles of hot smoking, including temperature control, wood chips, and curing brines, you can unlock the full potential of this versatile ingredient.

Whether you're looking to add depth to your breakfast dishes or create show-stopping sides for dinner parties, hot smoked bacon is an excellent choice. With its rich, complex flavors and satisfying texture, it's no wonder that many foodies and chefs swear by its versatility in the kitchen.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI'm not going to say that a butcher no I am going to say that the bacon at a butcher shop is better if you love bacon but I've never had it from a butcher shop you're missing out this is a hog or half a hog I'm going to show you how I butcher it cure it smoke it slice it and even cook it to turn it into bacon the way a butcher does it hog is my first love yes it is most if not all small butcher shops are going to use the whole animal from nose to toes toes are probably the only thing I haven't found anything to do with pork baking comes from the belly but before we can get to it we need to break down the hog into a few larger pieces the first thing we're going to do is remove the shanks God this is like the bed you don't want in your in-law house okay with the boning knife I'm going to remove the for shank and the hind shank a bony knife is usually between five and 6 in long this is the type of knife that you want to use to get in between the bones in the winter time would normally cut the for shank into rounds brine them and cure them and smoke them something that you can use for making like a split pea soup and then we have the Trotters a lot of gelatin a lot of aspic going to saw off the shoulder from the loin here here we have one bone two 3 four and five I'm going to cut right between the fourth and fifth this bone saw is to saw directly through bones I generally prefer a shorter bone saw I feel like you can have more steer to it where the longer bone saws sometimes bend a lot when I'm using them come through with a scimitar and just separate the shoulder from the loin section top part of the shoulder here is what we would refer to as the Boston butt or pork shoulder the bottom half is known as the picnic ham traditionally in my family we use this one this is more like the Peril which is the leaner part I'm going to remove the ham with my bone saw I'm just going to rest it here on the hip the H bone here and the tail and I'm going to separate I'm just going to saw through it a lot of muscle very little intramuscular fat you you just want to saw until you hear the bone crack then you're going to come back and use a simitar to separate the muscle when you're cutting you really want to like put the point on the table and pull back so now you're left with the loin section rib loins is what you know more as your rib chops come from this end center cut loin or loin chops this is more like your Porter House T-Bone section if talking about beef and this here is your sirloin section which I love this end of the ribs is what we know as spare ribs or St Louis style ribs this part which curves is more your baby back ribs and under here this is all the belly I'm going to remove all of this leaf lard leaf lard was Crisco before we had Crisco the cleanest purest type of fat which is often used for baking the leaf here to protect your organs and just nestled underneath the leaf lard here is a kidney there we go the texture is much different than fatback it's a little bit more spongy and marshmallowy and feels like a fat cloud and I'm just going to saw right through the tail end remove the sirloin from the loin section this is where we're going to separate the pork chops from the spare ribs and the belly a all right what do you think of this table so now I'm going to separate the loin and the belly all of this is the belly just below these bones here these are our spare ribs once remove the spare ribs we're left with the belly run my bony knife just below these spare ribs I'm trying to go as closely as I can but maybe not too close I can leave some meat on the spare ribs but also leave meat on the belly so I'm just going to lightly and just connect the dots I'm coming underneath here we have our spare ribs and this is all the belly here okay this is where the bacon is I'm hot again so most of the fat is on the underside of this slab once we clean up the sides of this bacon it should wear roughly around 10 lb I'm going to clean up the sides because they're not even try to get it to be the same thickness so that when we cure it it all cures evenly you could smoke this whole slab of bacon but split this belly in half more for convenience than anything else really and that probably looks very familiar to you in the US you don't find skin on bacon that's something that you see more often in England releasing a little piece of fat here something for me to hold on to running my knife underneath the fat and I'm trying to run it as closely as possible to the skin and leaving as much fat as possible on the belly as you can tell I'm using like the whole length of the knife to try to get cleaner cut than lots of shingled cuts the skin almost feels like vinyl the fat is something that's just really creamy when it's warm and you're touching and it feels actually like lotion this skin that I just removed from the belly often times we'll cut them into strips and sell them as dog treats instead of buying a raw High that's been bleached and made to this like really white colored hide it's a very processed product for your for your pets so now clean up the sides even them out and then get them ready for cure so over here removed the skin it's trimmed and now it's ready to be cured at my butcher shop we dry cure bacon instead of wet curing I feel like the flavor is more intense or just more pronounced we are going to use a traditional pink salt sodium nitrate it keeps the meat very pink and uh not gray food born illnesses thrive in moisture so by removing all the moisture in this we are preventing any bacteria or foodborn illnesses to develop when you're using pink salt you want to make sure that you use 2% of the actual weight of the piece of meat that's 5845 lb 2% of 5.84 5 lb would somebody like to ask Siri 5304 G 5.34 5304 bacon generally has a little bit of sweetness to it to make the Cure blend we have equal parts of kosher salt and brown sugar you could interchange sugar and maple syrup going to add black pepper and coriander the coriander is not something that's traditional I really enjoy black pepper and coriander together I always have it kind of reminds me of the flavor profile of shami and here I'm going to add a little bit of cayenne just seems like a lot but it gives just a little bit of spice not a lot of spice right now this piece of bacon I don't know if you can tell but it's quite flexible it's quite floppy when this bacon is properly cured it's going to become really firm so I'm going to put this in a lug and we flip them every day that is going to make sure that the belly is cured evenly on either side the actual curing process it's going to take roughly a week incorporate the pink salt mix it all up and then we're going to rub the belly with this cure so basically what I want to do is pack it on I don't know if you can see but it's kind of like sticking now to that fat this piece of pork belly begins to sweat all of this rub is going to liquefy this feels so good I don't even want to stop this goes into your refrigerator for up to a week during the course of the week sodium nitrate the pink salt is going to remove all the moisture and all of the flavors are going to infuse this piece of belly it's firmer it's not as flexible in the last week this belly has sweat a lot it's released a lot of its moisture we could eat this as is and not necessarily smoke it it would still have to be cooked but the smoking just adds another layer of flavor I'm going to Hot Smoke this piece of bacon by hot smoking I want to be very careful that I don't do it too hot because I don't want all the fat to render out so I'm going to do it at 200° the smoker that I'm using has an electric coil I place the wood chips in the smoker which is going to be heated by the electrical coil which will then produce smoke I want to remove the bacon at a food safe temperature of 150° f it should only take just a few hours so this has been smoked and chilled the color I don't know if you can tell has changed if you would have put this into the oven and not smoked it it would have been a much paler color but the smoke definitely made this more of a darker brown um this is a slab piece of bacon there's a couple of different ways a butcher shop will slice their bacon it may be thin or thick but often times they will always have a piece of slab bacon and can cut it the way you would like the First Slice I'm going to face it which is remove the first piece this piece is generally a little bit saltier it's where the Cure has been touching I would just like keep for my lardon or something that I know is going to maybe cook in like a soup or stew face cut this side as well I'm going to have to cut off a piece of this bacon here just so that I can fit this on the slicer another piece of bacon sorry I can't know myself so now we're going to do some thinly sliced bacon going to use a deli slicer because the slices will all come out the same type of thickness I could hand cut these this is just much more efficient and it's all going to be the same I'm going to now do a thicker slice all right last one voila bacon you see the fat here some beautiful meat you see how it's still pink in color it smells really Smoky some people desire a thicker piece of bacon and may accompany their eggs with maybe one slice it's definitely going to have more bite you can still have the centers still be a little bit creamy and chewy and crispy at the same time but if you're someone who desires maybe something that's just like crispy then maybe you would desire something that cut thinner I'm going to fry up this bacon it's going to be incredibly crispy and delicious and I'm going to show you what that looks like fry up this bacon in this cast iron skillet it's going to cook within its own fat and it's just going to crisp up really really well I think we should do a fix slice first oh do you hear that yeah so I have this on a medium high the secret is not to flip it that often so just don't be impatient and let it fry up I don't want to be impatient but I'm being very impatient Bacon's starting to Bubble up a bit just starting to burn a little bit and that's going to happen especially if there's a little bit of sugar in your curing brine sugar tends to burn but this is looking very good while we were smoking it we smoked it on a low temperature because we wanted to maintain that fat that now is basically rendering out of these s slices of bacon and the bacon is now crisping up within its own fat right I'm going to lie them here on the cooling rack to let the fat just drip fry up a few of the thin slices all right thin slices of bacon popping careful much faster than the thicker slices love that that sizzling sound do you hear it ouch I thought I was partial to the thick until I saw these frying up and these look awesome these are done nice and crispy it's going to be salty delicious how does that look oh my God that looks so good doesn't it the biggest difference with the thin and the thick is that the thin one definitely crinkles up much more than the thicker this is something that I would like served up maybe next to like my eggs that I would eat more like a steak this thinner sliced bacon is something that I would prefer on my BLT F tea some bacon lettuce tomato here I go M delicious the bacon is crispy perfectly salty Lush and anxious and just awesome I'm going to taste this thick bacon because why not I just cooked it it definitely has a little bit more bite to it but you really can't go wrong it's bacon after all at the end of the day the bacon that you take home from your butcher shop is going to be a higher quality The Taste the texture is something that can't be beat go to your local butcher shop we put a lot of care into making this bacon and you can definitely taste itI'm not going to say that a butcher no I am going to say that the bacon at a butcher shop is better if you love bacon but I've never had it from a butcher shop you're missing out this is a hog or half a hog I'm going to show you how I butcher it cure it smoke it slice it and even cook it to turn it into bacon the way a butcher does it hog is my first love yes it is most if not all small butcher shops are going to use the whole animal from nose to toes toes are probably the only thing I haven't found anything to do with pork baking comes from the belly but before we can get to it we need to break down the hog into a few larger pieces the first thing we're going to do is remove the shanks God this is like the bed you don't want in your in-law house okay with the boning knife I'm going to remove the for shank and the hind shank a bony knife is usually between five and 6 in long this is the type of knife that you want to use to get in between the bones in the winter time would normally cut the for shank into rounds brine them and cure them and smoke them something that you can use for making like a split pea soup and then we have the Trotters a lot of gelatin a lot of aspic going to saw off the shoulder from the loin here here we have one bone two 3 four and five I'm going to cut right between the fourth and fifth this bone saw is to saw directly through bones I generally prefer a shorter bone saw I feel like you can have more steer to it where the longer bone saws sometimes bend a lot when I'm using them come through with a scimitar and just separate the shoulder from the loin section top part of the shoulder here is what we would refer to as the Boston butt or pork shoulder the bottom half is known as the picnic ham traditionally in my family we use this one this is more like the Peril which is the leaner part I'm going to remove the ham with my bone saw I'm just going to rest it here on the hip the H bone here and the tail and I'm going to separate I'm just going to saw through it a lot of muscle very little intramuscular fat you you just want to saw until you hear the bone crack then you're going to come back and use a simitar to separate the muscle when you're cutting you really want to like put the point on the table and pull back so now you're left with the loin section rib loins is what you know more as your rib chops come from this end center cut loin or loin chops this is more like your Porter House T-Bone section if talking about beef and this here is your sirloin section which I love this end of the ribs is what we know as spare ribs or St Louis style ribs this part which curves is more your baby back ribs and under here this is all the belly I'm going to remove all of this leaf lard leaf lard was Crisco before we had Crisco the cleanest purest type of fat which is often used for baking the leaf here to protect your organs and just nestled underneath the leaf lard here is a kidney there we go the texture is much different than fatback it's a little bit more spongy and marshmallowy and feels like a fat cloud and I'm just going to saw right through the tail end remove the sirloin from the loin section this is where we're going to separate the pork chops from the spare ribs and the belly a all right what do you think of this table so now I'm going to separate the loin and the belly all of this is the belly just below these bones here these are our spare ribs once remove the spare ribs we're left with the belly run my bony knife just below these spare ribs I'm trying to go as closely as I can but maybe not too close I can leave some meat on the spare ribs but also leave meat on the belly so I'm just going to lightly and just connect the dots I'm coming underneath here we have our spare ribs and this is all the belly here okay this is where the bacon is I'm hot again so most of the fat is on the underside of this slab once we clean up the sides of this bacon it should wear roughly around 10 lb I'm going to clean up the sides because they're not even try to get it to be the same thickness so that when we cure it it all cures evenly you could smoke this whole slab of bacon but split this belly in half more for convenience than anything else really and that probably looks very familiar to you in the US you don't find skin on bacon that's something that you see more often in England releasing a little piece of fat here something for me to hold on to running my knife underneath the fat and I'm trying to run it as closely as possible to the skin and leaving as much fat as possible on the belly as you can tell I'm using like the whole length of the knife to try to get cleaner cut than lots of shingled cuts the skin almost feels like vinyl the fat is something that's just really creamy when it's warm and you're touching and it feels actually like lotion this skin that I just removed from the belly often times we'll cut them into strips and sell them as dog treats instead of buying a raw High that's been bleached and made to this like really white colored hide it's a very processed product for your for your pets so now clean up the sides even them out and then get them ready for cure so over here removed the skin it's trimmed and now it's ready to be cured at my butcher shop we dry cure bacon instead of wet curing I feel like the flavor is more intense or just more pronounced we are going to use a traditional pink salt sodium nitrate it keeps the meat very pink and uh not gray food born illnesses thrive in moisture so by removing all the moisture in this we are preventing any bacteria or foodborn illnesses to develop when you're using pink salt you want to make sure that you use 2% of the actual weight of the piece of meat that's 5845 lb 2% of 5.84 5 lb would somebody like to ask Siri 5304 G 5.34 5304 bacon generally has a little bit of sweetness to it to make the Cure blend we have equal parts of kosher salt and brown sugar you could interchange sugar and maple syrup going to add black pepper and coriander the coriander is not something that's traditional I really enjoy black pepper and coriander together I always have it kind of reminds me of the flavor profile of shami and here I'm going to add a little bit of cayenne just seems like a lot but it gives just a little bit of spice not a lot of spice right now this piece of bacon I don't know if you can tell but it's quite flexible it's quite floppy when this bacon is properly cured it's going to become really firm so I'm going to put this in a lug and we flip them every day that is going to make sure that the belly is cured evenly on either side the actual curing process it's going to take roughly a week incorporate the pink salt mix it all up and then we're going to rub the belly with this cure so basically what I want to do is pack it on I don't know if you can see but it's kind of like sticking now to that fat this piece of pork belly begins to sweat all of this rub is going to liquefy this feels so good I don't even want to stop this goes into your refrigerator for up to a week during the course of the week sodium nitrate the pink salt is going to remove all the moisture and all of the flavors are going to infuse this piece of belly it's firmer it's not as flexible in the last week this belly has sweat a lot it's released a lot of its moisture we could eat this as is and not necessarily smoke it it would still have to be cooked but the smoking just adds another layer of flavor I'm going to Hot Smoke this piece of bacon by hot smoking I want to be very careful that I don't do it too hot because I don't want all the fat to render out so I'm going to do it at 200° the smoker that I'm using has an electric coil I place the wood chips in the smoker which is going to be heated by the electrical coil which will then produce smoke I want to remove the bacon at a food safe temperature of 150° f it should only take just a few hours so this has been smoked and chilled the color I don't know if you can tell has changed if you would have put this into the oven and not smoked it it would have been a much paler color but the smoke definitely made this more of a darker brown um this is a slab piece of bacon there's a couple of different ways a butcher shop will slice their bacon it may be thin or thick but often times they will always have a piece of slab bacon and can cut it the way you would like the First Slice I'm going to face it which is remove the first piece this piece is generally a little bit saltier it's where the Cure has been touching I would just like keep for my lardon or something that I know is going to maybe cook in like a soup or stew face cut this side as well I'm going to have to cut off a piece of this bacon here just so that I can fit this on the slicer another piece of bacon sorry I can't know myself so now we're going to do some thinly sliced bacon going to use a deli slicer because the slices will all come out the same type of thickness I could hand cut these this is just much more efficient and it's all going to be the same I'm going to now do a thicker slice all right last one voila bacon you see the fat here some beautiful meat you see how it's still pink in color it smells really Smoky some people desire a thicker piece of bacon and may accompany their eggs with maybe one slice it's definitely going to have more bite you can still have the centers still be a little bit creamy and chewy and crispy at the same time but if you're someone who desires maybe something that's just like crispy then maybe you would desire something that cut thinner I'm going to fry up this bacon it's going to be incredibly crispy and delicious and I'm going to show you what that looks like fry up this bacon in this cast iron skillet it's going to cook within its own fat and it's just going to crisp up really really well I think we should do a fix slice first oh do you hear that yeah so I have this on a medium high the secret is not to flip it that often so just don't be impatient and let it fry up I don't want to be impatient but I'm being very impatient Bacon's starting to Bubble up a bit just starting to burn a little bit and that's going to happen especially if there's a little bit of sugar in your curing brine sugar tends to burn but this is looking very good while we were smoking it we smoked it on a low temperature because we wanted to maintain that fat that now is basically rendering out of these s slices of bacon and the bacon is now crisping up within its own fat right I'm going to lie them here on the cooling rack to let the fat just drip fry up a few of the thin slices all right thin slices of bacon popping careful much faster than the thicker slices love that that sizzling sound do you hear it ouch I thought I was partial to the thick until I saw these frying up and these look awesome these are done nice and crispy it's going to be salty delicious how does that look oh my God that looks so good doesn't it the biggest difference with the thin and the thick is that the thin one definitely crinkles up much more than the thicker this is something that I would like served up maybe next to like my eggs that I would eat more like a steak this thinner sliced bacon is something that I would prefer on my BLT F tea some bacon lettuce tomato here I go M delicious the bacon is crispy perfectly salty Lush and anxious and just awesome I'm going to taste this thick bacon because why not I just cooked it it definitely has a little bit more bite to it but you really can't go wrong it's bacon after all at the end of the day the bacon that you take home from your butcher shop is going to be a higher quality The Taste the texture is something that can't be beat go to your local butcher shop we put a lot of care into making this bacon and you can definitely taste it\n"