Diya's Food Diaries

Make Your Own Beef Bacon

If you're feeling adventurous or just like making your food from scratch, we've provided a quick how-to on making beef bacon at home:
Ingredients:
■1/4 cup Kosher salt
■2 tbsp. black pepper
■2 tsp. paprika
■2 tsp. ground coriander ■1 tsp. pink salt
Instructions
Step 1: Cure the beef. A basic dry cure recipe follows:
Pink salt is a special curing powder that goes into all kinds of cured meats, including sausages, hot dogs and corned beef.
Mix the ingredients together and rub the mixture all over the beef. Seal it in a ziploc and refrigerate for 3 to 5 days. Turn it every day. Liquid will seep out: this is a normal part of curing.
Remove from the bag, rinse in cold water, dry off and refrigerate one more day, unwrapped and uncovered, so that it's dry.
Step 2: Smoke the beef: Applewood, maple, cherry, or hickory are great choices. Set your smoker to 200 to 250 F and smoke until the meat's internal temperature reaches 150 to 160 F (about 4 hours). Use a digital probe thermometer .
Chill overnight, then slice thinly and cook on a pan from a cold oven. Slow cooking helps the fat render without burning.
Cooking Beef Bacon
Slow, indirect heat is a better cooking technique. Arrange the bacon slices on a pan, place it in a cold oven, close the door, set the temperature to 400 F and then don't touch anything for 15 minutes.
In fact, this is the best cooking technique for ordinary bacon as well.
Getting it right largely depends on how thinly sliced the bacon is. But as long as you cook it slowly you should be fine. Let it cook 15 minutes and then check it every minute after that until it's just right.
Remember, transfer the cooked bacon to paper towels right away, otherwise the hot fat in the pan will continue to cook it.
Beef bacon won't have the same flavor that ordinary bacon does. But it does have its own unique flavor. If you're old enough to remember the days when french fries were fried in beef tallow, you might recognize the characteristic flavor profile of beef bacon.
Use it wherever you'd use bacon: with
breakfast, crumbled on salads or baked potatoes, or in sandwiches.