Cold Smoked Bacon I Make at Home (Guide and Pictures)

Cold smoking bacon at home is probably my favorite type of curing and cold smoking that I do. I have refined my process over many years and wanted to share a breakdown step-by-step on how I do this.

For me cold smoked bacon is real bacon.

The other main method is hot smoking bacon until it’s cooked means you really just re-cooking bacon a second time.

If you follow this form of solid process for dry curing and cold smoking, I believe it creates better outcomes.

At the end of the day, cold smoking is really just drying out the meat with some smoke under 30°C or 86°F. I prefer under 15-20°C or 68°Fish.

The smoke carries antibacterial and antifungal properties which were used in the past to protect the meat and makes bacon taste awesome as well!

How to Cold Smoke Bacon at Home

Here are the steps and summarization to make your own tasty bacon from pork belly or any other cut pork.

With each step – I’ll go into a bit of detail, I will also provide some pictures to showcase it. Lastly, I’ll talk about some of the ins and outs around cold-smoking bacon at home that I’ve learned.

Steps to Cold Smoke Bacon at Home

1. Trim Pork to a Uniform Size
2. Remove Skin if Desired (or keep for stews and stocks)
3. Weigh Pork Belly or Saturate Salt cure
4. Calculate Salt
5. Rub and Mix Cure in a Bowl Over Belly
6. Place Pork and All Cure Inside a Ziploc or Vacuum Sealed Bag
7. Leave in Fridge for one week per 1-inch Thickness of Pork
8. Remove From Bag, Rinse if Desired
9. Hang or Dry on a Rack or Plate in Fridge for 3- 8 hours to form Pellicle
10. Cold Smoke for 4-20 hours, depending on Smoke Flavor
11. Complete at 15-30% Weight Loss
12. Remove Skin, Slice, and Freeze in Slices on Baking paper

Cold Smoked and Hot Smoked Bacon

Quick summary of the difference if you’re new around here.

Cold Smoked Bacon: Is curing the meat (wet or dry curing) followed adequately by drying the outside of the meat to form a pellicle so the smoke vapor sticks to it.

The meat is then cold-smoked until the desired weight loss has been reached, between 15 and 30%. I have now gone into the habit of freezing slices and bagging them. Then, when I want, I just throw a handful into the pan!

Hot Smoked Bacon: When curing the meat, you add salt for flavor but not to preserve it. You smoke and cook the meat indirectly with hot heat until it reaches a cooked internal meat temperature. Then, you slice and eat, or re-fry and eat.

Breakdown Steps to Cold Smoke Bacon at Home

1. Trim Pork to a Uniform Size

Of course, the classic cut to use is the pork belly. Where I live, it’s sometimes hard to get good quality pork that’s older than eight or nine months, which means it’s often two inches or less thick. The thinner, the better, I find. But then there is also the fat-to-meat ratio. Most prefer at least 50% solid white fat running through the belly.

The loin can be used with a streak of fat around the outside and some solid meat inside. I have used a range of random cuts of pork depending on whatever I had handy.

If you have a uniform size, especially one that is suited to the width of your vacuum sealer bags or ziploc bags will of course make things easier (see above the squeeze..).

2. Remove Skin if Desired (keep for stews and stocks)

When I first started making bacon with pork belly, I used to take the skin off and make pork crackle with it.

But nowadays, I like to leave the skin on. This takes a little bit of time once the curing, smoking, and drying are done to remove the skin, but it’s worth the effort, I find.

I use kitchen scissors to cut out small squares of the skin and freeze them in a bag. They are an excellent addition to stocks and give you that delicious smoke flavor.

3. Weigh Pork Belly

Once you’ve achieved the desired shape for your chunk of pork, you need to weigh it to calculate an equilibrium cure.

You can do it the old-school way using a saltbox saturation method. This entails putting a layer of salt above and below your pork and then leaving it for one day per kilogram of meat in the fridge.

The challenge I had with this approach is that it’s often been too salty. For many years, I have used the equilibrium cure, which creates a salty brine and equalizes the amount of salt evenly throughout the meat.

My equilibrium calculator is used thousands of times a month. On this page, there is a link to some guides on equilibrium curing.

4. Calculate Salt and Spice Curing Mix (Equilibrium Curing)

If you haven’t come across equilibrium curing for curing meat at home, this is something you really want to get familiar with.

Here is a summary:

Different teaspoons of salt will have different weights depending on the salt structure and the brand. However, it will still be the same volume, which makes volume measurements with teaspoons and tablespoons inconsistent.

It still blows my mind that most cooking recipes still have not changed to a more accurate measurement of grams or ounces! And we wonder why the recipe doesn’t come out right 🙂

For nearly all the dry curing that I do, I choose the salt level between 2-2.75% of the weight of the meat. To give you an example, 2% salt equals 20 g per 1000 g of meat. This is the minimum level of salt for equilibrium curing that I talk about in detail in my charcuterie course.

Salt 2.5%

Sugar 1.25%

When you use the above percentages, you cannot go wrong. I have been using this type of cure for over 10 years.

Garlic, Juniper, and Pepper of each 0.5-1%

Dry Herbs like Thyme, Oregano 0.1-0.5%

I’ve been writing a ‘guide to spices’ over the last month, which I am going to add to the supplementary materials in my meat curing course.

Depending on how thick you like your bacon you can adjust the salt level, because one thing you learn about dry-cured meats is that the perceived saltiness changes greatly with thickness. I talk about this more below.

The normal kitchen scale you have at home probably only has an accuracy of 1 or 2 grams, but you really need a minimum of 1 decimal place accuracy (i.e. 0.X or 0.XX). Home curing for charcuterie meat curing ideally 2 decimal places.

Using the metric system rather than the imperial system with these types of calculations is much easier.

5. Rub and Mix Cure in a Bowl all Over the Belly

In a bowl proportionately large, I sprinkle the cure mix with one hand and work it into the meat with the other. I make sure all the crevices and flaps of meat have the cure mix on them.

You have to spread and sprinkle the mixture all over because you want to make sure it’s covering each side.

Then you wipe up the bowl with the meat to get as much of the cure adhering to the meat as possible.

You can also put any leftover cure from the bowl into the meat in the bag.

6. Place Pork and all Cure Inside Ziploc or Vacuum Sealed Bag

When all the meat and cured are nicely placed inside your bag (you don’t really need a vacuum sealing set-up), just make sure there’s no oxygen left in the bag.

Equilibrium curing gives you a bit more flexibility because it doesn’t matter if the curing is a week or two longer then you need.

One week per 1 inch of meat is the golden rule

All I do is roll the bag up and squeeze as much of the air as possible out. 

An optional step is to place some kind of weight on top to force the cure through the meat a bit more.

Flipping the bag every two or three days is always a good idea.

In effect, when you create a very accurate wet curing brine that is doing some water-binding, the salt will start sticking to the cells inside the meat just as the old method of saturation curing diffusion occurs – to a certain extent this is happening from the meat science side of it too.

7. Leave in Fridge for 1 week per 1-inch Thickness of Meat

I like to place it inside the vegetable drawer at the bottom of the kitchen fridge or underneath the vegetable drawer.

It is always a good idea to write down on the bag the start and end dates, what it is you are curing, and when you check the finishing weight, especially if your doing a batch!

I have developed auto-calculating spreadsheets with my online course, and since equilibrium curing, I now have developed some winning recipes!

8. Remove from Bag. Rinse ‘if desired’.

I like spices and cracked pepper on the outside of the many bacon of dry-cured meats I make, so I don’t rinse—unless with some wine, of course!

Because equilibrium curing is done precisely, you don’t have to check the level of saltiness that occurs.

In some other bacon recipes I’ve read online, they talk about soaking the meat afterward but this is generally only needed if it is over-salted – as mentioned which I have with saturation curing a fair bit.

9. Hang or Dry on a Rack or Plate in Fridge for 3- 8 hours to form Pellicle

If you want to know about the pellicle I wrote about here, this is a quick rundown on it.

If you form a pellicle on the outside of the meat before you cold or hot smoke the bacon, the smoke vapor and smoke flavor will stick better to the meat.

I usually dry the pork in the fridge for eight hours during the day or overnight.

The pellicle binds the proteins together on the outside of the meat and develops a tacky, sticky feel when touched with your finger.

10. Cold Smoke for 4-20 hours, depending on Smoke Flavor

I’ve done cold smoking in many sessions going for 7 days with 8 hours a day of cold smoking. This is excessive in my opinion, but you do get a preserving effect. Cold smoke vapor can’t really do much more to the meat after a few weeks, I think.

Cold smoking is like many things in life—less is better than more, although sometimes we forget this.

I find cold smoking has a level of subtlety

You don’t want big bellowing chunks of smokiness – no – you want to see a transparent and decent amount of airflow through it as well.

For certain types of dry-cured salamis, it might take 3 approx. 8-hour sessions based on the traditional recipes.

For cold smoked bacon I like to do either 3 hour sessions or 6-hour sessions and the maximum is eight hours for our household bacon.

For me this is one 12 inch pellet tube session or a half 12 inch pellet tube session.

The next level of control is to get the smoke generator going, which gives you a great controller and very clean combustion.

Complete at 15-30% Weight Loss

Weight loss is important because, for example, when you are dry curing meat such as prosciutto or pancetta you want a minimum weight loss of 30%. When this is done you slice the meat wafer-thin and it is ready to be eaten.

Not so much for cold smoked dry cured bacon, since your going to cook it eventually

Since I always cook my bacon, I have been experimenting with a 15% or 20% weight loss.

You don’t need to put it in the curing chamber; you can put it in your kitchen fridge for a week or two.

You can also hang the meat in a reasonably suitable environment around 52-68°F or 10 to 20°C. But if you’re not putting it in a controlled environment like a curing chamber or a kitchen fridge, then, of course, you expose it to other bits and pieces in that uncontrolled environment

If you want more information about building a DIY curing chamber, check out the post that I wrote here.

Remove Skin, Slice, and Freeze in Slicers on Baking Paper

As I mentioned earlier, removing the skin once the meat has dried takes time. Yet, I consider it a valuable resource.

Certain types of deli slicers make wafer-thin slices, which is more important for dry-cured meats than for bacon.

I use either an Iberian ham prosciutto type of knife or a brisket knife to get nice uniform cuts (Brisket knife probably better, this knife is a beast!).

If you want to dry cure meat and have THE type of deli slicer that will do the job, it’s an investment, but it will do what you want. I recommend a slicer that makes slightly thinner bacon slices, barely 1 to 2 mm.

I recommend and talk about wafer thin slicing here.

Another tip is to freeze (not completely) the pork belly for half an hour to an hour. This makes the belly firmer and easier to slice with a knife.

I have found that it’s great to have cold smoked frozen slices of bacon ready when you want to eat ‘al fresco’ or just fry them anytime.

I slice the bacon and lay it down on a tray with baking paper. Then I freeze it for about a couple hours.

The frozen sliced pieces of bacon go in a bag and, hey presto, all I need to do is grab a handful of bacon whenever I want and throw them straight into the frying pan.

Types of Wood for Cold Smoking Bacon

In many other posts, I’ve discussed different types of wood to use or not use. If you generally use fruitwoods and hardwoods, then you’re alright.

Any fresh green woods are not recommended for smoking because they can be bad for your health and lead to bad flavors as well.

Here is post I wrote on easy wood selection for smoking food!

Ways to Cold Smoke

Here is a link to different gear you can use to cold smoke bacon and a breakdown of the process. As an introduction, I’ve written a full guide below, which goes into the detail of cold smoking all sorts of things like fish, vegetables, salt, etc.. including meat.

Guide to Cold Smoking

Find more information in my guide ‘cold smoking’ here, which is also bundled into my charcuterie course as mentioned.