Page 144 - YC Cooking School

2. Combine the salt, sugar and saltpetre.

3. Roughly chop the bay leaves and the juniper berries and add them to the salt
mixture.
4. Roughly grind the black peppercorns and add to the salt mixture. You now have the
curing mix needed to turn pork belly into bacon.
5. Use a handful of curing mix per piece of belly and rub the mixture all over each piece
until well coated. Keep the rest of the curing mix to use later.
6. Place the pieces of pork belly into an open container and leave in the fridge
overnight.
7. The next day, remove the bellies from the fridge and rinse the container out. Rub the
belly pieces with more of the curing mix and put them back into the fridge.

8. Repeat this process for five days.
9. When the curing process is complete, rinse the belly pieces to remove excess salt and
pat them dry with kitchen paper. Then wrap each piece in greaseproof paper and
keep in the fridge.
10. You can cure pork belly for up to 10 days – the longer the cure the longer the bacon
will last in the fridge. Pork belly cured for longer than 5 days will be very salty though,
and will need to be thoroughly rinsed before cooking.
11. Slice the pieces of cured pork belly and cook as you would store-bought bacon.

© Recipe copyright of Peter Goffe-Wood

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