Month: October 2024

Overdue bacon making

Why?

Well, we ran out of the last bacon I made, a while ago. Even worse, Mrs Walrus bought some shop bacon, which we know just isn’t as good as the home made kind. You might suppose making bacon is difficult. You might even suppose it’s something to do with an old, vulgar joke, but that’s up to you. How come I know how to do it, then? Simple. I stand on the shoulders of giants…

Some useful books.

How?

Well, I had to nip out to the shops, as I had no mozarella, and it is Pizza Saturday. After that, I nipped into the butcher’s shop near the supermarket. (I would have given you a link to Deri Page, St Clears, but I don’t do links to Facebook pages.) There were only a couple of people waiting, and I enjoyed the conversations about their relatives who never eat minced beef, and make that two kilos, please, and what on earth is going on in Laugharne? Then I bought a nice bit of pork belly, complete with skin and ribs.

Belly pork, with eight ribs still in.

I used my favourite Sabatier boning knife to separate the ribs from the belly, trying not to cut too close, because when you’re eating ribs off the barbecue, it’s best if there’s a good amount of meat on them. I left the skin on, other bacon makers remove it now. That might give them a quicker cure, but I like the choice of whether to fry the bacon with or without it.

The ribs, not too closely cut.

Of course, the remaining meat and skin were too big to fit in my plastic brining box, so I cut them in half.

Two pieces of belly pork.

The cure I used is mostly cooking salt, with some dark brown sugar mixed in, and this time, about half a teaspoonful of ground white pepper. Some of it gets rubbed fairly firmly into the meat, while the rest is kept handy to use as the curing proceeds in the fridge, which is usually about two weeks. I look at it daily, draining the liquid from the box, and checking that no mould is trying to establish itself. If it does, I wipe it off with vinegar soaked kitchen towel. It never comes back from that!

Pork with cure on it.

I used to put far more cure than this on at first, but it really doesn’t need that much, and you can end up with bacon that’s too salty.

Both bits of pork, with cure, in a plastic box.

There are actually two plastic boxes in the picture, the inner one has holes in it for the liquid that emerges from the pork to drain down into. It’s tipped out daily, more cure is added as necessary, and the meat gets turned over. If anyone knows a proper word for that liquid, please enlighten me!

End of part one…

Part the Second

I have washed the cure off, patted the meat dry, and put it back in the fridge, propped up on chopsticks to dry out for a week or so. Then I’ll smoke it. There will be pictures.

Part Three

A day ago, I set up the ProQ smoker, filled with oak sawdust, in its specially optimised smoke chamber (it’s a galvanised dustbin from B&Q), hung the bacon up, and started the sawdust smouldering. I don’t mess with little candles to light it, a blast from my blow-torch does the trick. It burns for about twelve hours. Today, I went and got the smoked bacon. I’ll be slicing it tomorrow, and vacuum packing the results, before freezing them. I may also have a bacon sandwich.

And, finally…

I have a bacon slicer. It’s not a very good one, but it’s better than my previous one, which was Chinese, and had internal gears moulded roughly from steelmaker’s slag, or possibly something worse. The gears wore out within weeks. Anyway, I’ve sliced the bacon into a range of rashers, rough chunks, and indescribable bits and pieces. They will all taste lovely. And, in order to store portions without continuing to make everything smell like smoked bacon (I’m not saying that’s a bad thing), I have used this lovely little vacuum packing machine.

It’s not democracy.

The UK somehow seems just to trundle along, with things mostly getting worse for everyone, all the time. There are occasional little bursts of progress, but they soon get eroded away. It’s odd, though, because we change our government from time to time. Yet things just head in the same inevitable downward spiral.

Way back, before the Industrial Revolution, we were ruled by Kings, Nobles, and the filthy rich. Kings were descendants of the guy who was best at intimidating or murdering his opponents, and the people knew it was best to do as they were told, if they didn’t want Mr Sword to meet them violently.

After the Industrial Revolution, the Kings and their chums were joined by the successful industrialists, who set themselves up as the landed gentry. There was a Parliament that made laws, and you could be in it if you had lots of money, or were a lord. Most people weren’t allowed to take part in the voting to select who was in this very wealthy clique.

Now these people felt certain that it was their place to rule over us, because they were rich and important. They made sure Parliament did what they wanted.

But there were these dreadful progressive types, who felt things ought to be more democratic, and the number of people allowed to vote for the government kept increasing. The ruling class didn’t like that. So they made sure they could influence whatever government got itself elected, using money, rather than Mr Sword, and Mr Gun.

And people were fooled into thinking this was a democracy. It’s not.

Whoever was in Parliament, the ruling class already had them under their thumbs in advance, and continued to run things for their own benefit.

Nowadays, this continues. The ruling class make donations to politicians of the major parties, in the certainty that the policies they like will be put in place by the politicians they own. And this is why Keir Starmer is continuing the policies of Rishi Sunak. It’s also why, no matter what policies the Labour Party Conference decides upon, the leadership just does what the ruling class wants done.

And this has been going on for hundreds of years, and it is going to be very difficult to change it, even though the people hugely outnumber the ruling class, because there will always be greedy people willing to sell us out for a bit of luxury for themselves.