Bacon - Curing and Smoking Bacon

Curing and Smoking Bacon

Bacon is cured through either a process of injecting with or soaking in brine or using plain salt (dry curing).

In America, bacon is usually cured and smoked, and different flavors can be achieved by using various types of wood, or rarely corn cobs; peat is sometimes used in the UK. This process can take up to eighteen hours, depending on the intensity of the flavor desired. The Virginia House-Wife (1824), thought to be one of the earliest American cookbooks, gives no indication that bacon is ever not smoked, though it gives no advice on flavoring, noting only that care should be taken lest the fire get too hot. In early American history, the preparation and smoking of bacon (like the making of sausage) seems to have been a gender-neutral process, one of the few food-preparation processes not divided by gender.

In the United Kingdom and Ireland, smoked and unsmoked varieties are equally common, unsmoked being referred to as green bacon. The leaner cut of back bacon is preferred to the bacon from the belly (that is ubiquitous in the United States) which is referred to as streaky bacon due to the prominence of the bands of fat. While there is a tendency on both sides of the Atlantic to serve belly bacon well-done to crispy, back bacon may at first appear undercooked to Americans.