Making Bacon- pig processing part 3

This is the final post about the pig I swear! We made up a rub rather than a brine. It was a combination of maple syrup, a TON of salt, and brown sugar. Maine Man rubbed it on and we kept it in the fridge for 7 days flipping daily.

We came up with a couple smokers. The above one was borrowed from some friends, Mike & Bea (THANKS SO MUCH!)

And this one came from my dads, he had it in storage for many years.

Thankfully we had M&B's because this one did not work. That was a real bummer because I really loved the look of this one. What year do you guess this came from? I still have the booklet downstairs so I will check and see.

This is a rather fatty piece of bacon that we actually kept as a salt pork. Unfortunately the only one that I took a picture of. We had to soak the bacon for a couple hours prior too smoking to get some of the saltiness out. After rinsing the rub off the meat MM soaked it for an hour then cooked a piece repeating this cycle until we felt it was not too salty.


Processing the pig ourselves was well worth it and we will do again. We have sampled everything we put up and it is SOOO good! Since we do not have a whole lot of deer hamburg left I have found the ground pork has been a great substitute. So for I have used it in spaghetti, chili, tacos, and plan to make a meatloaf with it over the weekend. Before now I never thought to use this way before.