Bacon 24/7 | Steven Raichlen's Project Smoke

Made from scratch bacon, Canadian bacon, Tulsa torpedo, and snow crab poppers. We're rocking the smoker at the scenic J.W. Marriott Star Pass Resort in Tucson, Arizona. I'm Stephen Reikland and this is Project Smoked. In the beginning there was bacon, in the middle and the end too. From breakfast bacon and eggs to outlandish bacon brownies, bacon has become a national obsession. Today I'm going to show you how to cure and smoke belly bacon and Canadian bacon, then use them to make a Tulsa torpedo and bacon snow crab poppers. It's bacon 24-7 here on Project Smoked. When it comes to cool factor, not to mention bragging rights, nothing beats home-smoked bacon. This is a five-pound slab of pork belly from a heritage hog called a Berkshire. You can see the beautiful alternating layers of meat and fat. Heritage animals are old-timey breeds that were developed for their flavor, not their meat yield or fast maturing. When you buy your pork belly, ask the butcher to remove the skin for you. The next step is to make the cure. The cure starts with kosher salt, freshly ground black pepper, brown sugar and pink salt, sometimes known as Prague powder, a curing salt that contains sodium nitrate. Now don't get all nervous about sodium nitrate. It is a compound that occurs naturally in many foods. It is used as a preservative and it's responsible for the handsome crimson color of bacon. Mix the ingredients for the cure with your fingers. If you're wondering why pink salt is pink, it's colored pink so you won't confuse it with regular table salt. Once the cure is ready, turn the bacon over, sprinkle half of the cure over the meat side and rub it into the meat. Then turn the bacon over. Bacon was originally salt cured to preserve it in an age without refrigeration. And don't forget to put cure on the sides. Once the pork belly is completely coated with the cure, place it in a heavy-duty resealable plastic bag. Now fold the bag over and seal the zipper and cure your pork belly in the refrigerator for five days, turning it over every day. What happens is the salt will draw out some of the moisture in the pork belly which mixes with the seasonings to create a brine. This further cures the pork belly. Now, let me show you the smoker. We're using an electric smoker. It's fueled with these pecan sawdust discs. Load the sawdust discs into the hopper and set the temperature to 160 degrees. This is a pork belly we cured five days ago. It's ready to go now, and you can see the meat has already started to take on that rosy bacon color. That's thanks to the pink salt, the curing salt. So place the bacon on the smoker rack and place it in the smoke chamber. Smoke the bacon for about four hours. The FDA recommends a safe internal temperature of at least 145 degrees. It's been four hours and check out that bacon. Beautiful pecan wood smell. You can see the color of the bacon. The fat is crusty on top and place it on a wire rack to cool. You want a wire rack so the air circulates beneath it so the bottom doesn't get soggy. And I'll transfer the bacon to a cutting board. You can eat the bacon hot. Normally, you'd let it cool. You might even refrigerate it overnight to firm up the flesh. And let me carve a slice here. Oh man. One advantage of curing your own bacon, you can slice it as thick as you like. Look at that. Cut another slice here. You can see the beautiful pink color you get from the curing salt. Okay. Cut one more slice here. Obviously, if you let the bacon chill overnight, it will be easier to slice. And you can actually eat the bacon as is. Remember, it's fully cured and smoked. But most people... Mmm. Oh my god. That smoke flavor. This is like I'm eating bacon for the first time in my life. Most people want to fry the bacon in a skillet or cook it on the grill. Quick saute. Brown up the bacon a couple minutes per side. They ought to bottle that smoke and sell it. Once the bacon is browned on one side, turn it over. Oh yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Okay. Transfer the bacon to a plate or platter. I'll just cut a little piece. Oh man. This is everything you dream about in bacon. It's a little sweet, a little salty, nice smoke flavor, but above all, you taste the pork. Up next, Canadian bacon you cure and smoke yourself. Leave it open. What are we doing? We're prepping for the next Canadian bacon recipe. We're preparing charcoal for that. It'll be mixed with hickory. What's your title here? I'm the International Smoke and Fire Angler on the set. Bacon is hardly what you'd call a health food, but Canadian bacon is made with lean pork loin instead of fatty belly, so it's dramatically lower in fat. Unlike the previous bacon, we'll cure the pork loin in an aromatic brine. Step number one. Preheat a dry skillet and roast garlic. Star anise. Has a smoky anisey flavor. Black peppercorns. Fennel seeds. Fresh thyme and bay leaf. Roasting brings out the aromatic oils and makes these seasonings incredibly fragrant. Once the spices are roasted, add them to hot water. Then place the pot on the burner and heat the liquid almost to boiling. Our next flavoring is fresh fennel. You could think of this as licorice flavored celery. I'm using fennel stalks, which I'll cut crosswise into quarter-inch slices. So gather up your sliced fennel stalks and add them to the brine. You can see we're kind of playing a licorice thing here with the fresh fennel, the dried fennel seeds, and the star anise. Now, whisk in kosher salt, granulated sugar, and pink curing salt. And whisk until these ingredients are dissolved. Then add the ice water. This will cool the brine to room temperature, at which point it's safe to pour over the meat. This is a three-pound pork loin. You can see it's dramatically leaner than a pork belly. To speed up the brining process, use an injector. Plunge it into the brine, pull the plunger back to load the injector. Then insert the injector needle into the center of the pork loin and inject the pork loin with brine. That way your pork loin will brine from the outside in and the inside out. Now pour the remaining brine over the pork loin. Then cover the pork with plastic wrap and brine it in the refrigerator for five days, turning the pork twice a day so it brines evenly. So here's a pork loin we brined five days earlier. What you do is take the pork loin out, drain it well, and place it on a wire rack to dry. You want the surface to feel tacky, so the smoke adheres to it, neither too wet nor too dry. Let me show you the smoker. So I'm using a ceramic cooker, also known as a Kamado style cooker, to smoke the Canadian bacon. I filled the firebox with charcoal and I added a couple lumps of apple wood to generate wood smoke. There is a heat diffuser, also known as a convector plate, over the coals under the grate. This diffuses the heat. To maintain a consistent temperature in the cook chamber, I'm using a digital temperature controller. There is a fan here that controls the airflow and a digital controller here. You clip the thermocouple to one of the grill grates and that measures the temperature in the cook chamber. Place the Canadian bacon on the grate over the heat diffuser and to monitor the internal temperature of the Canadian bacon, insert the meat probe deep into the pork loin. Now close the cooker. You're working at 225 degrees, approximate cooking time four and a half to five hours. You'll cook to an internal temperature of 160 degrees. I hear the alarm beeping, so let's check the Canadian bacon. I'll just shut off the alarm. Look at that. Take out the heat probe. Here is your Canadian bacon. Normally, you'd let it cool completely, but I am so eager to try it. I'm going to slice into it right now. Beautiful crust on the outside. And you can see this nice sort of crimson pink color, thanks to the curing salt. Hmm, and it's perfectly cooked. Look how juicy it is. All right, let's take a slice. See how we did. Oh man, this is so flavorful. You get the sweetness of the fennel and sugar, the saltiness of the cure, lots of nice wood smoke. And you know, a lot of commercial bacon never sees the inside of a smoker or smokehouse. It's flavored with liquid smoke. So when you make your own bacon, your own Canadian bacon, you can guarantee you're getting the real McCoy. Poppers have been a fixture on the barbecue circuit for years. Traditionally, they are made by stuffing jalapeno chilies with either cream cheese or pepper jack cheese, wrapping them in bacon, smoking them. I had the idea to stuff half jalapenos with cream cheese and snow crab, a delicate cousin of the king crab. Again, wrap it in bacon, smoke it in a smoker, and by only stuffing half a pepper, you infuse the filling with more wood smoke than you would if you used a whole jalapeno chili. Slice 12 jalapeno chilies and a half lengthwise and scrape out the pith and seeds. Stuff them with cream cheese, pieces or shreds of snow crab or king crab, lemon zest, smoked paprika, and mix these ingredients together. Stuff the mixture into the jalapeno chilies. Next, wrap each pepper half crosswise with bacon. Secure with a toothpick. Smoke until the bacon is crisp and the filling is bubbling. What do we got going on in there now? This is a Tulsa torpedo, which is a Polish sausage wrapped with breakfast sausage studded with spicy sausage wrapped in a bacon weave for maximum pork enjoyment. In the annals of American barbecue, there are a lot of outrageous dishes, but none can rival what I call the Tulsa torpedo. It consists of a bacon weave wrapped around a log of pork sausage stuffed with kielbasa, hot links, and pepper jack cheese. It's a cardiologist's nightmare, not to mention completely and outrageously delicious. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more is more. It's hard to imagine a more unrepentantly rich dish than the fatty served at Burnco BBQ in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here's the Project Smoke version, and it starts with a bacon weave. Lay out eight strips of bacon parallel one next to the other. Now fold every other strip in half through the middle. Lay a ninth strip of bacon perpendicular to the other strips. Then refold the folded bacon over this strip. Lift up now the other strips. It's easier to see than to describe. And fold down. Now do the same from the other side. One. Finally lay the last strip of bacon on top, fold the tabs over, and here's your bacon weave. Now the next step, take about two pounds of pork breakfast sausage. We were lucky enough to get Mongolitsa pork. That is a heritage breed raised for its flavor instead of its meat yield. Turn this on to a second sheet of aluminum foil. Remove the pan and the plastic wrap, and pat the pork into a rectangle roughly the size of your bacon weave. Next, add a layer of thinly sliced pepper jack cheese. I told you this was excessive. Arrange another layer of cheese right beneath the first. The idea is to cover three quarters of the sausage with the cheese. Next, take two kielbasa or other smoked sausages. You see I cut the ends off so I can butt them up together. And finally arrange thinly sliced hot links over the cheese. So you've got sweet breakfast sausage, smoky kielbasa, spicy hot links, and pepper jack cheese. That's what I call flavor. Now using the foil, roll the sausage and cheese first around the kielbasa. Then continue rolling to encapsulate all the ingredients together. Then roll the log up back in the aluminum foil and twist the ends and refrigerate the sausage log for one to two hours to firm it up. Here's the chilled bacon weave and here's the chilled sausage roll. What you want to do is sort of fold this back and turn the sausage roll into the bacon. Now using the foil to help you, bring the bacon weave over the sausage. Remember where your seam is right here and roll this up again. Twist the ends and refrigerate for one more hour to firm up the bacon and sausage. Meanwhile, let me show you the smoker. To cook the fatty, I'm using an offset barrel smoker. These originated in the oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas. This is actually made with 20-inch oil pipe. So I've lit a hot bed of charcoal in the firebox and to generate smoke flavor, I'll add three or four hickory chunks. So here's the chilled fatty and you just want to unroll it and find the seam. When you put it on the smoker, you're going to let it fall seam side down. Fold this down and place the fatty in the smoker. Looks amazing, doesn't it? That plaid makes me think of the Burberry barbecue. Close the smoker lid. Cooking temperature 275, cooking time about two and a half to three hours. Okay, the Tulsa Torpedo should be ready. And wow, look at that! Bacon beautifully browned. I love the way the cheese is just oozing out a little bit. Looks done, but let's check for doneness with an instant-read meat thermometer. Insert the probe deep into the center. We're looking for a hundred and sixty-five degrees. Bingo! Nailed it! So then carefully ease the torpedo onto a baking sheet and transfer to a cutting board. And then using a serrated knife, cut it crosswise and check it out. How cool is that? This looks so luscious. The cheese is oozing. The kielbasa is surrounded by the hot links. Nice smoke ring. And here's the moment I've been waiting for. This is outrageous! You get the heat from the pepper jack cheese and the hot link sausage, garlic flavor from the kielbasa. Of course, the whole thing bound together with the smoke flavor of the bacon and the hickory smoke. It's just out of this world. So now you know the secret of curing and smoking your own bacon. Bacon Crab Poppers and Tulsa Torpedo. Send us photos of your smoke masterpieces. See you next time. Show that this takes courage, tempered with mercy. I'm Stephen Reikland and this is Project Smoke. Did you want me to stop? Looks like a smiley face.