How Pro Butchers Make Bacon

I'm not gonna say that a butcher...

No, I am gonna say that the bacon

at a butcher shop is better.

If you love bacon, but have never had it

from a butcher shop, you're missing out.

This is a hog, or a half a hog.

I'm gonna 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.

[jazzy music]

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 bacon 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 gonna do is remove the shanks.

God, this is like the bed you don't want

in your in-law's house, okay?

With the boning knife,

I'm going to remove the fore shank

and the hind shank.

A boning knife is usually

between five and six inches long.

This is the type of knife that you want to use

to get in between the bones.

In the wintertime, would normally cut the

fore 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, we have one bone.

Two, three, four, and five.

I'm gonna 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

which is more like the bernine,

which is the leaner part.

I'm going to remove the ham.

With my bone saw, I'm just gonna rest it here

on the hip, the H bone here and the tail.

And I'm gonna separate.

I'm just gonna saw through it.

A lot of muscle, very little intramuscular fat.

You just wanna saw until you hear the bone crack,

then you're gonna come back

and use a scimitar to separate the muscle.

When you're cutting, you really wanna

like hit 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 porterhouse, 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 gonna 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 lard's here to protect your organs,

and just nestled underneath the leaf lard here

is a kidney.

There we go.

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The texture's much different than fat back.

It's a little bit more spongy and marshmallowy

and feels like a fat cloud.

And I'm just gonna saw right through the tail end,

remove the sirloin from the loin section.

This is where we're gonna separate the pork chops

from the spare ribs and the belly.

[sawing noise]

[laughs]

[sawing noise]

All right.

What do you think of this table?

So now I'm gonna separate the loin and the belly.

All of this is the belly just below these bones here.

These are our spare ribs.

Once we remove the spare ribs, we're left with the belly.

Run my boning 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 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.

Oh, I'm hot again.

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So most of the fat is on the underside of this slab.

Once we clean up the sides of this bacon

it should weigh roughly around 10 pounds.

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.

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 onto,

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 it,

it feels actually like lotion.

This skin that I just removed from the belly,

oftentimes we'll cut them into strips

and sell 'em as dog treats, instead of buying a raw hide

that's been bleached, and made to this like really

white colored hide.

It's a very processed product for your pets.

So now clean up the sides, even them out,

and then get them ready for cure.

So right here.

Remove the skin, it's trimmed,

and now it's ready to be cured.

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At my butcher shop, we dry cure bacon

instead of wet curing.

Because I feel like the flavor is more intense,

or just more pronounced.

We are going to use a traditional pink salt, sodium nitrate.

And it keeps the meat very pink, and not gray.

Foodborne illnesses thrive in moisture,

so by removing all the moisture in this,

we are preventing any bacteria

or foodborne illnesses to develop.

When you're using pink salt, you wanna make sure

that you use 0.2% of the actual weight of the piece of meat.

That's 5.845 pounds.

0.2% of 5.845 pounds.

Would somebody like to ask Siri?

[Siri] 5.304 grams

5.304. 5.304.

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 pastrami.

And here I'm gonna add a little bit of cayenne.

It just seems like a lot

but it gives just a little bit of spice,

not a lot of spice.

And 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 gonna 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 wanna do is hack it on.

I don't know if you can see

but it's kind of like sticking now to that fat.

When this piece of pork belly begins to sweat,

all of this rub is going to liquefy.

This feels so good, I don't even wanna stop.

This goes into your refrigerator for up to a week.

During the course of the week,

sodium nitrate, the pink salt,

is gonna 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 wanna be very careful

that I don't do it too hot,

because I don't want all of the fat

to render out.

So I'm gonna do it at 200 degrees.

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 degrees Fahrenheit.

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've put this into the oven and not smoked it

it would've been a much paler color.

But the smoke definitely made this

more of a darker brown.

This is a slab piece of bacon.

There is a couple of different ways

a butcher shop will slice their bacon.

It may be thin or thick.

But oftentimes they will always have a piece of slab bacon

and can cut it the way you would like.

The first slice I'm gonna 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 lardones or something

that I know is going to maybe cook in like a soup or stew.

Face cut this side as well.

I'm gonna 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 couldn't help myself.

So now we're gonna do some thinly sliced bacon.

I'm 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 gonna be the same.

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I'm going to now do a thicker slice.

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All right, last one.

Voila, bacon.

You see the fat here, some beautiful meat.

Do you see how it's still pink in color?

It smells really smokey.

Some people desire a thicker piece of bacon,

and may accompany their eggs with maybe one slice.

It's definitely gonna have more bite.

You can still have the center

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 to cut thinner.

I'm gonna fry up this bacon.

It's gonna 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 gonna crisp up really, really well.

I think we should do a thick slice first.

Ooh. 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 wanna 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 carrying brine.

Sugar tends to burn.

But this is looking very good.

While we are smoking it, we smoked it on a low temperature

because we wanted to maintain that fat.

Fat now is basically rendering

out of these slices of bacon.

And the bacon is now crisping up within its own fat.

All right, I'm gonna lie them here on the cooling rack.

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 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 gonna be salty, delicious.

How's 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.

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BLT. Some bacon, lettuce, tomato.

Here I go.

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Delicious.

The bacon is crispy, perfectly salty,

lush and unxious, and just awesome.

I'm gonna taste this thick bacon, because why not?

I just cooked it.

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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.

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