 Hi folks, it's Todd with Survival Shrupa. Welcome to another video. Today I am going to be making or actually dry curing a pork belly to make bacon for a trip that is a backpacking trip to my two nephews and are taking in July. And what I wanted to do was to salt, brine manning and Steve Kritter Davis making their own smoked and dry cured pork belly. And in a traditional fashion, this will last once it's cured and salted and smoked. It will last six months or more without refrigeration as long as you keep it in a cool dark area. So what I thought I'd do today is that brine was nice enough to send me, I asked him for his recipe and I think it's similar to what Kritter does. But it's going to basically comprise two items. The main ingredients are kosher salt or any kind of salt. This is kosher salt which I had in the house. And I didn't have quite enough, I didn't think for the whole process. So I pulled down two boxes of just regular table salt, not with iodine. And then we've got eight pounds of salt and eight pounds of light brown sugar. Of course, we don't keep that in the house very much for the holiday cooking. And then we saw we used it. So I went by Malooka Walley World and got all the sugar that I needed. One other thing that Brian said that he used was black pepper just to coat the outside. So what we're going to do is I went by yesterday and picked up from Earth Fair, local grocery store, all natural kind of food place, one town over. And picked up a fresh pork belly from these guys and they've got some great meat that we always buy from. This particular side weighs 6.63 pounds. And it was on sale yesterday. I got a new shipment in and put the new shipment on sale, not the old stuff. For $2.99 and 7 pounds. So I paid a total of $20. I mean $19.82 for this 6.5 pound piece of meat. And what we want to do now is just lay it out. And one of the things that I go camping, typically, typically we will bring some kind of fruit, fruit, freeze dried camp packs or whatever. But on this trip with my two nephews, I decided that we're not doing that. We're going to take bacon. We're going to have some bacon. I'm going to do eggs. And I'm going to get to you another video on how I'm going to do the eggs. So let me show you the piece of meat that I've got. So that's about 6.5 pounds. And so what I thought I'd do to get it to fit into these containers, these two containers here, thought I would just find the grain and we're running this way. So I'm going to slice that in half so that I can cure one half and one of these containers, the other half and the other container. So we've got a knife. So I'm just going to go about halfway here. So now I've got two slabs. Two good slabs of bacon. That is going to taste fine when we're doing our three day backpack trip in Arkansas. So if you take a look at that, man, that has some good looking meat. Here that sucker up, throw it in the pan, fry it up on the trail, nothing like it. Here we go. All right. Now, Brian didn't have a video on his channel about the curing process but he did seem to the recipe. But Steve Davis has one on his channel. His channel is Woodcrafter 76. Brian Manning's channel is Snowwalker 13. Both great guys, Pathfinder Folk and you can't find better folks. So go check those guys out. I'll put a link at the bottom of this video for both their channels. Great resources. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to pause the video and mix me up some of the mixture, some of the curing mix, and this small and this container over here. All right. So I just got a big stainless steel serving tray which I use outdoors with my smoke. I'm just going to dump that back into a bigger, a larger bowl and mix this up. Stir it until we get about integrated together. I'm going to thank my wife for not being here today. So I could get in her kitchen and destroy it. That's a good looking piece of meat. All right. We're going to put that in there. And I don't want to contaminate this. I don't know that it would really matter but I'm not going to. I'm going to try and keep it as dry as possible. If I keep sticking my pork hands back in there then I'm going to be bringing pork back into my mixture over here. So I'm just going to dump it in just like I do when I do a butt rub and just start rubbing this in. Let me get the camera closer so you can see this. Now when I smoke butts, I'm going to put this in here. Now when I smoke butts, when I smoke it out back, you just got to make sure that you get all of your crevices, nooks and crevices and crannies covered with this salt or whatever cure mixture you've got going. And what I'm thinking is, I'm thinking that I'm going to put more salt in here because this just doesn't look like it's going to cover or do what I'm thinking it should do anyway. But because the sugar just doesn't seem to apply like my other dry rubs that I do. And I'm not crazy about that. So after I get some of this on, I'm going to make sure we got plenty of salt on it. Make sure you get all the edges coated. And what this is going to do, which I've never salt cured or dry cured any meat in my life, I've read about it and never tried it. So this is a first for me and I'll give you some more resources that you can follow, especially Brian and critters channel. And you can look into how meat preservation was done back in the 18th century period. Now that's coated but I'm not satisfied with the amount of salt in there. And I'm going to add a little more salt in there. Give me a little bit of this. So it sets on that. And I'm going to turn it, a flesh side up. And that one's ready to sit. We'll do the other one. Same way. I'm going to put you through that again. I'm going to get back with you as soon as I get them done. All right. So we've got the two sides of Port Valley rubbed up with the cure solution or the dry rub basically. And we've got one half there and then one half here. So we're going to stick these in the fridge and I've got the other cure that we didn't use right here and I'll store that until tomorrow when I reapply after I drain the liquid off of these. And I'll keep you posted on how this goes. Okay. This is what we've got on day one after about 24 hours of the cure being on the Port Valley. You can see that. I've got a, I don't know, maybe half a cup of juice that's drawn out of that piece of meat from the cure. And you know, two of them set up here. The other one looks about the same. So what we're going to do, what Brian said to do is to drain this off and then reapply the rub. So just want to show you that on day one what it looks like. And I'm not going to show you the whole process of draining it as you just pour it off and reapply the rub. All right. Get back with you on a few days of this. Okay. Back in that I'm brought. I've already tried it at home but not over fire. So this is, I put it in a nickel bag because this stuff is money. Now I wrapped it in this bag, put it in this bag but I also put it in a zip lock since we're up here in Oshita. And right there is gold. Camp gold. How many y'all want boys? I get a couple. I get a couple slices. Alright. It's rather from here. Oh yeah. That's the LT Wright Genesis that got it the light show. So far, I'm really enjoying it. Alright, so we just took cooked up some dehydrated eggs in that bacon grease. Over the fire. And the texture is not what you would find in scrambled eggs, but it tastes just like them. So anyway, the boys are eating some bacon, which we've got said no here on a rock. And I'm heating me up a little bit of coffee. Coffee water, or either cocoa. So anyway. It's a good breakfast for first day out on the trail, first morning on the trail anyway.