City Cottage 2 | Page 44

Dry Cure Bacon

Making bacon at home is a subjective business, and be sure to be happy with your product before you eat it. The Laycock Dry Bacon cure in the Weschenfelder Curing Kit has a recipe which is fairly foolproof, and works well. You need add nothing extra to this recipe.

You need:

70 g Laycock Dry cure per kilo of meat.

Simply rub the meat all over with the cure mix, getting into all the nooks and crannies and lay it in a shallow container.

Put this in the fridge for 5 to 8 days, reapplying the cure mix that has come off the meat and rubbing it in.

After a day or so, the water will have been drawn from the meat and this can then be used to simply baste te meat until it is ready.

I suggest you leave it like this, basting each day for 6 days.

Wash off the remaining salt and slice, you will have brilliant bacon.

This bacon will cost you a fraction of that bought in the shops, and cooks amazingly. You will not want to buy bacon again having made it, and that's a guarantee!

Low-salt dry cure bacon

I have to keep my salt intake low, so the video shows the bacon I mostly make. It is very mild, but still very bacony.

The video, which will play in a window, calls for 100 g salt for 2 kilos of meat. If you haven't made bacon before I suggest you go for 140 g salt instead, just to be on the safe side. It is worth watching to see the basic technique of rubbing in the cure.

It also uses sugar and pepper - but remember, the salt is the important part!

Dry cure bacon using the Laycock cure