Christmas bacon

lanailife

New member
I've been "Smokin'-It" for a bit over a year now, and one of the favorite things in this household is the bacon. Found a great local butcher who supplies us with fantastic pork bellies, and we've had a lot of fun with trying various smokes.

This past Christmas, I had it in my head to try "Christmas bacon." That said, I don't know exactly what in the world "Christmas bacon" even is, I'd never heard of it specifically, but it sure sounded good so about a month ago I got on it. Lots of searches high and low, and in old books and so on, revealed not much of anything. Closest I found were some online recipes for a candied bacon and sugar concoction, and that was definitely not what I was after. And then I remembered ... for years my folks would go down to the market, where they have lots of ethnic and old-timey stands, and they really liked this particular Hungarian paprika smoked bacon. They used to get it every Christmas. First few times I had it years ago it actually made me nervous because it looked like the raw (but smoked) bacon you buy in the store, but my folks and everyone who got it would have it just as it was, usually on bread. And it was delicious. But things changed, that vendor is no longer down there at the market, and since we have a Smokin-It now it seems the perfect time to try to make something special for the holiday ourselves.

So I knew that this so-called "Christmas bacon" would be heavy on the paprika, but in my estimation it should also be sweet. Not candied, not too sugary, we want to highlight the sweetness of the pork and glide on that, but give it a little extra sweet to kind of emphasize what's naturally there.

So I took my pork belly and used the basic dry cured bacon recipe from this forum:

https://www.smokinitforums.com/index.php?topic=1797.0


We do watch our sugar, so our recipe was modified to be ground Himalayan pink salt, the sodium nitrite, and coconut sugar instead of regular granulated white sugar.

So with the belly wrapped in that, we put it in the fridge and let it sit, turning it every morning, draining the tray as needed. We gave it ten days and then racked it.

After sitting in the fridge another day, I prepped it by giving it a rub with yellow mustard a la the Lazy Q book, and then rubbed it nicely with the seasonings. The seasonings were an about equal mix of paprika, organic coconut sugar, and organic ground mesquite. My thoughts were that mesquite, traditionally a good beef seasoning, had a nice natural sweetness and would compliment the paprika.

Then, we did something else out of the ordinary. In all my (many) bacon smokes so far, I'd do some cold smoking and then finish it off at a moderate heat, just as in most of the recipes outlined in this forum. But with the rush of Christmas, and this year a heavy snowstorm coming our way, I kind of rushed things ... we put it in using mesquite wood only, and I set it for 225 degrees. It was smelling great in no time, but I was already second guessing myself, so after an hour and 40 minutes, I checked on it and the inner temp was already at 160. I turned the heat down to 180 and let it go for another hour and 40 minutes.

By this time the winds were picking up and the winter snowstorm was blowing in. I opened the door of the smoker and checked on it, inner temp still 160, it looked terrific, so I called it and brought it in. We let it rack and cool overnight, then the next morning used our 1960s electric slicing knife to get into it.

And, I gotta say ... this was a complete home run! We loved it, but my hard to please dad was also happy with it, everyone loved it! It tasted great just as it is, but I found when you'd bake it at 350 for 5 minutes or just broil it a sec to get the fat crisping up, it was unreal!

Things I would do differently next time: try more of a dry rub, or a drier rub, still using the mustard but much less of it. And perhaps a bit more paprika in ratio to the other two rub ingredients to give a slight more bite. But, in all, we were and remain super happy with this bacon experiment and look forward to the next one!
 

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Thanks, old sarge!

It was delicious right from the smoker, but I also like it heated in the oven for about five minutes, just long enough for the fat cap to clear and start sizzling...
 

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