 Music Hey everybody, welcome to this special edition of Me Head. I'm doing something I've wanted to do for a really, really long time. That is homemade bacon. Homemade bacon comes from the pork belly. What I have here is about a 2 1 1 2 3 pound pork belly. I'm going to trim the skin off, I'm going to cure it, and it's going to be a process over between five to seven days. After this five to seven days, I'm going to pull out a fridge, I'm going to wash it off, throw it on a smoker, and we're going to slice it up and have ourselves homemade bacon. So I'm going to get the camera pointed down, and we're going to get started on this cure. All right, so what we have here is we have here going to need one cup of brown sugar, you're going to need half a cup of some kosher salt, one tablespoon of some black pepper, prake powder, one, curing salt. Okay, if you read this down here, this is four ounces, one ounce, cures 25 pounds of meat. So I had to do a little bit of some number crunching, and what I'm going to need here is going to be half a teaspoon of this into this mix. Okay, there is Himalayan sea salt, this is not Himalayan sea salt, Himalayan sea salt is just a flavor of your food, this is to preserve your food. All right, so there is a difference. So I got this off of eBay, it was like four or five bucks for this four ounce package. So I got a bowl here, we'll also have something here, and I'm also going to be adding some maple syrup and a little bit of whiskey to this as well. Half a teaspoon of prake powder, number one, that's all you need right there. I got some bourbon whiskey here, one tablespoon of bourbon whiskey. There you go. Maple syrup. Going some organic, all natural maple syrup. Going to go with two tablespoons of this. Okay, see that this side? Let's get this skin off of this pork belly here. And then the remaining fact, is obviously homemade. Okay. Then we'll start painting another Coronavirus here, the claws fell off the whole Shoshan here. I thought that it was quite in the past, but still not really. Alright, some people put these in a tray. Put these in a tray and cover it with plastic wrap. I think this is the best way to do it. So it's easier to just flip it over. You'll have to get your hands dirty. So I'm just going to be flipping it over every single day. I'm going to flip it over. I'm going to put this in the fridge and right now it's today a Saturday. So I'll be revisiting this back on probably Friday or Saturday of the following week. That's it. I'll see you guys in about six more days. Everybody, okay, well today is day number six and this is what we got. So I've had inside this bag here and you can tell it's got a lot of liquid here where the liquids we get in John added that pork belly. So I'm going to cut this open. I'm going to rinse it off. I'm going to let it soak in some nice cold water for a little bit and smoke it. Alright, so first look at this. It's hard. It's hard because all the moisture has been pulled out of it. There's still a lot of that salt on it. You can see all that salt stuff on there. So now we're just going to rinse this off some cold water. This isn't the biggest pork belly in the world so it's not going to take too long to smoke it tomorrow. But we do want a nice pellicle to form on this. The pellicle is the same thing that forms on sand and fish and what it does it helps it accept the smoke into it. We're just going to soak it for a couple hours. Maybe just by an hour I'll let it soak there and get some of that salt out of there. Alright, so I'd like to soak for just an hour because it is kind of small. So I'd like to go for an hour. I thought I was going to do for two hours but it started getting the indications that it's ready to come out. So it's going to pat it dry in it from here. You can move it over to the rack. From there I'm putting it into the fridge where it's going to stay for 24 hours. And we'll revisit this tomorrow and put it on the smoker. The cook. Show you guys what kind of charcoal we're using today. I'll be using some Kingsford Applewood Brickette. Never seen it before. It's new in our store. So I was like, yeah, I'm going to give it a whirl. Applewood would work really well with this pork belly. We also have some pearwood. I think there's some pearwood on there as well. So I'll be smoking with some Applewood Brickettes and some pearwood. And maybe a couple pieces of peacon here and there. Alright, so let me get the camera turned around and we're going to get things done. Alright, so I'm going to use electric fire starter today inside here. I'm going to show you how I do it. It's an easy way. It's only going to put a few holes in here. There we go. Actually, that might be too much. Get these all laid down here so you can see this. These all kind of lay down. I'm going to move them. Put your charcoal starter in there. Move them back around. Now you're going to use a lighter starter. Stay in the middle. Alright. That could have done a better job than that. You get the gist. And now you just, some coals around it. Now, you make sure you do this when it's unplugged. As soon as you plug this thing in, it is going to start lightening up pretty fast. Is that plug going in? Now we wait exactly eight minutes. Eight minutes, we're going to pull that. We're good to go. This is an option in case you don't want to do like the whole paper up underneath. Alright, I just hit the internal temperature inside the grill smoker at 150 on both sides. So that's my target temperature between 150 and 200. So I'm going to go ahead. This is a mesh screen. This is what you put fish on stuff. You get it. I got it from anywhere. So there you go. And the internal temperature, 150, and it's going to be done. Alright, so just hit the target temperature. It's been exactly, sorry, not a clock. It is 11.47. So this took two hours and 47 minutes for a two and a half to three pound pork belly. See what it looks like. See that? That's what that pork belly looks like. Let's remove this. I'm going to put it, we're going to leave it on this mesh rack. I'm going to let it cool down a little bit before I put it into the fridge. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple hours, get it nice and cold. I'm going to slice it up, put it in the pan for it, and we'll be done. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm going to put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. All right, so now it's time for the taste test. Just took it off. Let's get it all over. You know, there's bacon. There's bacon. The bacon you buy at the stores does not taste nothing like this. That's right here that the flavors are so much more enhanced. When you get a deeper flavor of that pork, this is a bacon that's supposed to be meant to be made. Yeah, it takes seven days to make it, but you know what? It's well worth it. Hey, I appreciate you guys joining me today. I'd like to subscribe. And I'll see you guys later.