Homemade Sausage Making

2 weeks ago I scored two beautiful skin on pork bellies when I went to pick up my 16 lbs of hard back fat. $2.99 a pound for the pork belly, and $1.99 a pount for the hard back fat.

Cured 25 lbs of bacon for the past 2 weeks, and sliced it all today. Smells awesome!

Just had to make a token BLT out of the scraps! Wonderful!

Made 22 lbs with brown sugar, cinnamon, and maple syrup (my wife and my boys favorite)

The other 3 lbs I used to make some curry bacon for myself too (my favorite!)

The Hobart 410 made short work of the slicing, especially since I partial froze the bacon for about an hour first, sure helps when slicing!

Bacon looks great Jason! And I'm sure it will fry up beautifully, without that white snotty liquid that comes out the supermarket stuff. So you did not smoke it at all?

Thanks Chris! No smoke on this batch. My wife likes hers with no smoke, so we just cured and sliced this batch.

I like to cold smoke mine, but I realized early on that if I can get her to participate a bit in my hobby then she doesn't complain as much when I buy things like the Hanna PH meter, convert a freezer to a drying chamber, etc!

I can always take a frozen pack and do a couple hour cold smoke on it, then stick it in the fridge to use the next day. I have a really nice Lonestar Grills vertical insulated smoker and an
A-Maze-N pellet tube that I use inside the smoker for cold smoking.

Here's the smoker I have, the standard one, not the mini.

http://www.lonestargrillz.com/Insulated-Smokers.html

Makes killer Q, but that's for another forum. Also have a stickburner that I use when I feel like playing with the fire all day.