I’ll be honest – bacon was not my first choice. I wanted to make guanciale, a cured bacon-like meat made from pork jowls. I had not really heard of it (I’ve been buried in French cookbooks for the last several years and have mostly ignored Italian cuisine), but after finding out it is traditionally served in pasta all’amatriciana, a dish I have loved since I first tried it last year at Rain Uptown here in Lubbock (despite being listed on the menu as “pink sauce with bacon”), I was set on making it. Unfortunately, jowls are not as easy to come by as you might think. I found plenty of salted jowls, and jowls still attached to the rest of the face (thanks, Amigos, but I’m not that hardcore yet), but no plain old jowls. I even checked with the local free-range, organic, grass-fed rancher we have occasionally bought from, but he said they only sold whole heads.

Having failed to locate some cheek, and lacking the strength of will to break down a complete head, I decided to make some bacon. I was mostly disappointed because bacon is the “apprentice challenge” this month, while pancetta or guanciale is the real deal. I was confused when I read it, since I thought pancetta was basically unsmoked bacon—shouldn’t bacon be the more difficult recipe? This was cleared up when I read the bacon recipe in Charcuterie, which says that while bacon is traditionally smoked, the authors realized most people do not have a smoker, so they recommended just roasting it in the oven instead. While I’m sure that’s still delicious, I don’t think I would consider it bacon. No smoke? No way. Besides, I do have a smoker.

I flavored my bacon with a heavy dose of crushed black peppercorns, a few cloves of smashed garlic, and a couple of crumbled bay leaves. After a week in the cure, I gave it a heavy dose of applewood smoke.

Headed into the smoker, where bacon is made

For me, the gold standard of bacon is Nueske’s, an intensely smoky, applewood-smoked bacon from Wisconsin. I first read about it in Hungry Monkey (an excellent book, highly recommended), and when my wife ordered some for me we found it every bit as wonderful as described. I think we would have switched exclusively to Nueske’s, but they don’t sell it around here and it’s $8 per pound (or more, depending on exactly what you order). To say that I hoped my homemade bacon would rival Nueske’s would be overstating things. I would have been quite happy to make something half as good.

It turned out better than I hoped! I haven’t done a side-by-side comparison with Nueske’s, but I would say the homemade stuff is every bit as good. When it hits the pan the house is filled with that lovely smoky aroma, and the bay and garlic give it a unique savoriness that doesn’t overpower it’s bacon-ness. It easily wins in price, I think I paid $2.50 per pound. I will definitely be doing this again. I’d like to make peppered bacon, sweet mapley breakfast bacon, jalapeno bacon, and plain old bacon for BLTs this summer – and I’ll definitely smoke them, we’re making bacon here.

I served some of the homemade bacon over the excellent nachos with cabbage, beans, and cilantro sauce from Serious Eats. These nachos are worth making just for the cilantro sauce, which we have since used on just about everything.

Bacon! You can make it at home!

Making my own bacon was surprisingly easy. If you live nearby and want to try it out, I have enough pink salt to cure a few hundred pounds of meat, and would even be happy to smoke your bacon for you – just let me know!