October 29, 2025

Bacon!

Creating Scrap Iron Chef’s Bacon is more of a project than a recipe, and I’ve been looking forward to this one. The prospect of making my own bacon, completely from scratch, has always interested me.

It started with the pork belly. I was able to find a 3.5lb one in the freezer at my local butcher, so I thawed that out, and cut it down to 2.5lb for ease of recipe adaptation. I then rubbed it with coarse ground black pepper:

And then popped it into a container with the cooled curing liquid:

I weighed down the pork with some pickle pepples that we had, and that worked well for keeping it submerged in the cure for the next three days.

After three days, it was go time. I pulled the pork belly out of the cure and put it on a sheet pan with a rack, in front of a fan, for a little over an hour to develop a nice pellicle on top.

After that, it was time to get it smoking. For cold smoking, I used a setup that I’ve been successful with in the past for making smoked cheese. Rather than rigging up a hot zone/cold zone smoker like AB does in the episode, I used a smoke tube together with some apple wood smoking pellets, right on my regular grill with the burners off.

After smoking for about 6 hours (I needed to refill the tube twice), I pulled the pork belly, or should I say the bacon.

After pulling from the “smoker” I vacuum sealed the whole thing and put it in the fridge for a few days. The recipe doesn’t say to do this, but when I do smoked cheese I let it rest for a while to let the smoke “sink in”. Figured it wouldn’t hurt with the bacon.

A couple days later, I borrowed a friend’s deli slicer to get to work. First, though, I put the whole belly into the freezer for about an hour to help with the cutting. After that, it was slicing time.

Since the slicer can fit ~8 inches left to right, I had to slice the short way a bit, leaving me with a few shorter pieces, but then I was able to get a whole bunch of normal long cuts. I also ended up with a chunk of bacon ends, which I’ll eventually render down to use for making clam chowder.

Finally, I divided up the cut bacon into vacuum-sealed packages about about 6oz each.

I froze most of it, but left two packs out – one to cook, and the other to give to Stan, who lent me the slicer.

At last came time to cook the bacon. I used my regular technique, which is similar to the one AB uses on the show – I lay the strips out on a sheet pan and pop it into a cold oven that I then set to 350. It takes 25-30m and the bacon comes out crispy and crunchy, just the way we like it.

– cooked bacon

Scrap Iron Chef's Bacon

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 2/5
• Used a 2.5lb pork belly, and halved the amounts in the wet cure
• Next time time would flip the belly and put the bottom of the belly up to dry with the fan and develop a pellicle
• Smoked it on a grill with a smoke tube, got about 2hrs of smoke per full tube. Smoked for a total of about 6 hours, which I think was plenty.