Buckboard Bacon and my 6th anniversary!

Wow! Yesterday marked my blog’s 6th Anniversary. I may not have been as active here during the last year as I wanted, but I’ve enjoyed writing and connecting with people from around the globe! I hope to keep it up for years to come!

A few weeks ago I found that other hobbiests have been curing buckboard bacon. I had never heard of such a thing! As it turns out, buckboard bacon is made with any other cut of pork besides pork belly. After reading a few accounts of wagon trains heading west and the list of supplies usually included 150 lbs of bacon- this makes sense that most of the “bacon” was most likely cured pork.

Whatever the origin is, I just had to try it! It seems that the most common cut to use now is pork butt (shoulder), so thats what I bought!

The first thing to do is to remove the bone… It wasn’t that difficult with a fillet knife to cut out the bone, but for now on I will buy the boneless roasts!

Once the bone was out, I placed the meat into 2 ziplock bags (gallon size or larger!) Each bag weighed just shy of 5 pounds.

The cure:

For each container I mixed:

• 1 teaspoon Pink curing salt #1
• 5 tablespoons kosher salt
• 5 tablespoons Brown Sugar
• 1 tablespoon black pepper
• 1 tablespoon garlic powder

Mix and pour into bag, along with approximately 1/2 cup water. Knead to cover the meat and pop it into the fridge!

Once a day, flip the bag over to keep the coverage of the brine even. Cure for 7 days (10 days if the meat is over 2″ thick)

Once the 7 days are over , rinse off the cure and soak in water for 90 minutes- changing the water every 15 minutes. If you don’t, your buckboard bacon will be really salty!

Smoke your bacon for 2 hours or if you don’t plan on cooking it again later, cook to 150f. I cooked mine to 150, but I still cooked it like bacon!

Is it lean bacon or kind of fatty ham? All I know it is was delicious on my homemade burger!