I ordered the traditional cure from sausagemaking.org and used two small bits of belly weighing under 1Kg each, bought from Sainsbury's. Not ideal, but I thought I should get n with this having been thinking about it for ages.
I more or less used this tutorial:
http://www.btinternet.com/~happydudevir ... bacon.html
As I said I used the traditional cure at 3% of the weight of the pork belly and I was amazed at how little of the cure was required. I then massaged it in and but the bellies in ziplok bags. I turned them every day without opening the bags even once, although I gave each piece a massage through the bag.
After 5 days I rinsed and dried the bellies and left them to dry out in the fridge. It all looked good and bacony so I gave it just a day of drying out and had to slice a bit off to fry it and taste it. It was really good! I am sooo pleased! Too many exclamation marks!!
Anyway, I have a couple of questions for the more expereinced bacon curers out there:
1) Each piece of belly seemed to give off a lot of liquid very early in the curing process, but by the time 5 days was up there really wasn't much left. this surprised me. Is this normal?
2) Maybe related to question 1, I saw that the weight of each belly was slightly higher than when I started. The 828g piece gained 14g and the 922g piece gained 16g. Is this normal?
3) I treated the bellies slightly differently inasmuch as I took the rind off one of them and left the rind on the other. Both appear fully cured and tasty, but I think the one where I left the rind on tasted a little bit porkier rather than bacony, if that makes sense. Should I have left the cure for longer on the one with the rind on? In future I think I will derind them anyway.
4) I used the standard traditional cure. Nothing else. Could I just add pepper, sugar, bay leaves, juniper etc. or will I then need to recalculate the amount of traditional cure because it will be "diluted" by other ingredients?
I hope people here can help or I might be forced to experiment on my own and who knows who I might damage?
Thanks in advance