Charcutepalooza: The Bacon, Pt. 2

After a week of sitting in good amazing marinate, it's time for this bacon to get ready to be eaten! And just in time: the apartment is starting to smell like ham, which isn't a bad smell unless the smell starts to seep into your clothes and you start to get comments from strangers about your unique scent. Which is a good indication: if you start to smell like a pig, then you must be ready!

After sitting in its juice for a week, the pork has taken on the nice aroma and color of the herbs and spices rubbed into it. The mostarda sadly is hardly apparent. After a week of marinating, the sharp mustard smell is not there at all. Next time, I will have to increase the mostarda from two tablespoon to...heck, maybe the whole container. Also, after a couple of days of marinating a dark juice settled at the bottom of the pan , soaking the bottom half of the bacon. I freaked out--I thought the bacon started to go bad and the juice is its life oozing out of it. But after consulting Ruhl's book, I realized that the juice is natural, even desireable. So after a couple of days, I made sure to turn the slab over to let the top part get in on the action.

Washed a ready to go into the overn. The meat is far too thin to really hold a thermometer up during cooking, but I used it anyway and it managed to stay up.

Autoabbronzante.

Cooked, chilled, and sliced the next day. Really nice aroma of thyme, nutmeg, honey, and peppers. I was a little wary of the middle being cooked enough, but by the looks of it it's pretty darn cooked. The pink color is also very hypnotizing.

finally, fried bacon! OK, I burned it a bit, but still very good. Not sweet as expected, but smoky, with palpable hints of thyme and nutmeg. I think this would go well cooked in pasta...or just good traditional 'merican breakfast.