What you do with your bacon today is the template for the next few days, really.

Get your container out of the fridge.  You’ll notice the liquid in the bottom – its  probably a brown colour from the sugar in your cure.  This is called the pickle and is completely normal – it’s made up of salt and sugar from the cure, and liquid being drawn out of the meat – but we want to get rid of it, or our dry cure will turn into a brine cure pretty quickly.  So hold onto your bacon securely while you pour the pickle away.  Don’t bother trying to dry the meat or the dish or anything like that, though.  You might also notice, like mine, that the skin of your bacon has gone a bit blotchy.  This is because of uneven distribution of the cure at this stage, and isn’t anything to worry about.

Now look at the dry cure you have left over and roughly divide it into four parts (or five, if you’re making back bacon).  Accuracy isn’t important here, just more-or-less.  Now rub your quarter (or fifth) of cure all over the bacon like you did yesterday, leaving the bacon the other way up in the dish – so if it was skin-up yesterday, skin-down today.

That’s it, about a minute’s work. Just replace your clingfilm and put the dish back in the fridge.

All the Big Bacon Challenge posts will be collected under the ‘BigBaconChallenge’ category heading – so go there to read them all!

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