In this installment
Bacon bits
About Jowl Bacon
What’s up with nitrates?
Bacon bits
Maker: Chris Eley and company in Indianapolis, Indiana
Cure: Dry Cured for seven to ten days in salt and pepper
Smoke: Smoked over applewood for 12-18 hours
Taste: Mild, slightly sweet and a little nutty.
About Jowl Bacon
Jowl Bacon or Hog Jowl or ‘Joel’ bacon, as those with a drawl might call it has been around the food world for awhile, but as been rising in popularity in recent years. It’s been a staple of soul food for generations, but thanks to the artisan movement and products like Italy’s guanciale coming into prominence. It comes from the cheek of the pig. It’s not a big piece of meat and there are only two of them per pig, but the amount of fat laced throughout the meat makes it something very flavorful and very special.
This jowl bacon comes to us from Smoking Goose in Indianapolis, Indiana. Aside from curing up some really tasty meats, they do an amazing job of sharing the lost art of butchery through whole hog classes and a ton of education for their staff and customers. They cure this jowl bacon with black pepper and coriander to give it a nice bit of spice to accent the sweet, fatty profile.
Jowl bacon is a bit smaller than ‘normal’ bacon, and the smaller pieces fry up quicker than what you might find in your local grocery. Compared to the normal stuff, the fat on jowl is creamier and much more delicate. It’s not something to be trimmed off, it’s something to be savored. Fry up potatoes with jowl bacon or toss it with grilled vegetables. Because of it’s high fat content, you can render it down and cook all sorts of things in it like folks do with guanciale. There’s a lot of flavor in that fat so soak it up.
What’s up with nitrates?
People are often worried about meat cured with nitrates. Nitrates have been used to cure meat for millennia. As long as the traditional method is followed, there’s no need for concern.
Here’s a brief description of the process for those of us who crave a chemistry refresher, NO3 is the chemical symbol for sodium nitrate. Sodium nitrate is added in the traditional curing process. The bacteria and microbes present go to the work on the meat, sucking one of the three oxygen molecules away, turning NO3 into NO2, sodium nitrite.
NO2: Sodium nitrite is unstable and aggressive to microbes. It’s the compound that does the real work of curing, making it safe for us to eat. It is a carcinogen.
NO: While NO2 does its job, another oxygen molecule is leeched off. What’s left is nitric oxide NO. This molecule is stable, it is not a carcinogen.
The cure started with NO3, a safe molecule, and ended with NO, a safe molecule. In the middle we had a dangerous molecule, NO2, which is now eliminated.
Nitrates are necessary for curing bacon.
But if nitrates are necessary for curing meat, how can some packaged bacons they say are nitrate free?
The trick is celery. It’s high in nitrates. Concentrated celery juice is used in the curing instead of the naturally occurring mineral sodium nitrate. The FDA allows it to be called “natural flavor” instead of “sodium nitrate.” The words may be different, but the chemistry behind it is essentially the same.