- Brent.
- Ben.
- Do you know what my favorite thing
to eat is for breakfast?
- Lucky Charms?
- Do you know what my second favorite
thing to eat for breakfast is?
- Bacon?
- It is bacon, God you are good.
- Wow, Prime Time.
We're going to go over three types of bacon.
Everybody's familiar with the traditional
belly bacon, it's amazing.
But the question is, what else can we do?
We're gonna make a jowl bacon from the head,
and we're also going to make a Canadian bacon
because we don't know what's happening in Canadia.
- This is from one animal,
you can get numerous kinds of bacon.
These are the three we wanna do
'cause right now we do the belly bacon
and we sell it like it's goin' outta style.
We don't always have Canadian bacon or jowl bacon
but we wanna make them more regular
part of the shop and what we sell.
So we're gonna mess with those
and see if we can make 'em really tasty for ya.
- Bacon time.
We have the whole pork loin here.
This rib section is what we're gonna cut into chops.
Just gonna take the loin end off right here.
Ben do you know why it's called Canadian bacon?
- As far as my research has told me,
it's only called Canadian bacon in the US
where we identify it as being from Canada.
- So it must be right.
- Yes.
It's just commonly known as either
just bacon or back bacon.
It's the same bacon that you would get
if you had Irish breakfast and English breakfast.
There's a lot more protein to it, and less fat.
It's kind of almost the inverted belly.
- [Brent] Here we go, boom.
Next we have a belly.
- May I do the belly?
- Please.
- Woo hoo.
Just gonna cut a nice piece here.
We got that off, we don't need to do
anything else to cure this, that's it.
We just need to get the skin off.
Every other bit of this is gonna be delicious
so don't trim it, don't touch it, leave it as is.
- I mean you can also see already,
cool that looks like bacon.
The jowl, you might have heard as Guanciale.
That is cured pork jowl which is often used in pastas.
- This'll be like kind of our low-fi American
way of doing a Guanciale.
A lot of the fat and the richness from the fat
is still gonna shine through.
It'll still be great for pasta I think.
- [Brent] What we're peeling back right here
is the actual cheek.
- This is where you almost wanna hear
like a chorus of angels.
That's how good the fat is when it's even slightly cured.
- Pork jowl is the whole cheek muscle.
This lean section is the actual cheek.
We have our jowls, belly, loin,
trimmed ready to go.
- I gotta big bucket of salt and brown sugar downstairs.
I just like to have one around.
- Getting into the curing process.
- [Ben] Yes.
- Ben, get to it.
This is a dry cure.
All we're doing is applying salt,
brown sugar, and pink salt.
Salt enters the cell walls to actually stabilize meat.
What that is doing is killing microbes.
So eating raw bacon, totally fine.
No microbes, no death.
Because cell walls are breaking down and we're replacing
protein which is mostly water, with salt,
it's going to leech out some water and/or blood.
Salt is performing all of these essential functions.
Ben, why do we got that sugar in there?
- A little bit of sweetness, a little bit of saltiness,
a little bit of smokiness, and a little bit of fat.
I mean these are the basic principles
of making something taste good.
- Any bacon that you're buying commercially
from a grocery store is done either
through a tumble or through a brine.
It happens a lot faster,
but that's a lot of water content
that you get into your bacon.
Whenever you fry it up and it's a big slice
that ends up being a little tiny slice,
that's because it's all water content
that you're being sold, that's water content
that you're losing whenever you're cooking it
and you end up with mediocre bacon.
We're gonna seal this up.
And we're gonna let it hang out for seven days.
(upbeat music)
(yawning and groaning)
- What day is it?
- It's been seven days Ben.
It's time to smoke the bacon.
- Okay.
(claps)
Let's do it.
Yep got it.
- [Brent] Doin' great, doin' great.
- Ohh.
(upbeat music)
All right let's do this.
So we got our three bacons.
We got our loin, we got our belly, we got our jowls.
A little bit of curer on the fat which isn't uncommon.
Fat doesn't take curer as well as protein does.
- This is the water that the bacon has purged.
Get rid of it, it's gross.
But just wanna show you that it is
going to purge some liquid, that is the curing process.
- I got the smoker ready to go, load it up?
- Yeah, let's go, smoke it.
The art of smoking.
- Oh it's an art now?
- Ooh, hoo hoo.
- Oh so fancy.
- Yes, exactly.
In smoking, you wanna get your smoker
to a temperature 160F,
180F,
where the wood is actually going to create smoke.
You don't wanna get it so hot so that
it's actually just roasting it like an oven.
So we wanna create the smoke but we wanna be cooking
at a really low level so that we don't
actually just cook the outside
and leave the inside to like a medium rare.
- All right let's do this then.
(upbeat music)
And that is what that is supposed to look like.
That is gorgeous.
- Absolutely, perfect.
- Yeah, they could not look more beautiful.
(upbeat music)
- This is fantastic, it's cooked all the way through,
cured all the way through.
Ben, you wanna eat some bacon?
- Yeah I was hoping to eat a giant bacon steak today.
(slaps arm)
- You look thin.
- Yeah, thanks.
- Let's go.
- [Ben] So let's do the belly bacon in the oven,
I think it does really well in there
and it stays flat it doesn't curl up on us.
It's a real nice even cook.
I've never grilled Canadian or back bacon before
so what the heck, let's give it a shot.
I think the jowl bacon does really really good in a pan.
We can control the heat a little bit more evenly,
so we make sure all the fat is kept in tact.
- I've never grilled bacon at all,
let alone grilled back bacon.
So I think it's gonna be great,
but I also think it was already the mildest
so maybe start there?
(upbeat music)
The cure, the smoke, all the flavor points.
Still hit the same.
- [Ben] Wanna move on to some belly bacon?
- [Brent] Sure.
- I like doing these in the oven
so that's the way we did it.
That's also why it's so flat.
At such an even heat gives it an even cook.
It doesn't curl up on you too much or anything like that.
Please enjoy.
- More bacon?
- More bacon.
(upbeat music)
- That's still fantastic.
- It's amazing.
- Good pork, dry cure, nice long smoke,
hits all of the points.
I wouldn't wanna change a thing,
for recipe development, cooking it, any of it.
I never get sick of this bacon.
- It never goes bad.
The fat and the sugars are caramelizing it
and there's just this sweet pop from it.
That's so good.
We cooked these ones in the pan,
and you'll see I didn't put too much heat on 'em.
I wanted the fat here is the thing
that's so good about the jowl.
We kept a lot of that fat goin',
so it's more fatty than maybe you were even anticipating.
- Fantastic.
Thank you.
I mean, it's an explosion of flavor.
Where this is like 60 percent lean
to 40 percent fat this is like 80 percent fat
to 20 percent lean.
That is so freaking good.
But also that one bite was just about enough.
- I think we should have this all the time.
I think we have to sell it differently though,
than the regular belly bacon.
This is not to be used with your breakfast
with your eggs, this is not a BLT bacon.
This is take something that's already good
like your brussels sprouts
and just add something else to them.
- Exactly.
- [Ben] And it's gonna make a world of difference.
- Three incredibly different textures.
This is lean pork chop,
the belly is exactly
what you think little bit of meat little bit of fat.
This is a s*** load of fat.
All of them aim to do different things.
How are you gonna use it?
How are you gonna cook it?
What are you gonna eat it with?
- The odyssey continues.
(laughter)
(upbeat music)