Welcome! We just made homemade bacon too. We used Ruhlman's recipe from
Charcuterie and it was excellent but I had a very hard time cooking/frying it without it browning too quickly. Even with it getting this brown though I noticed that it just tasted like browned meat, not burnt, bitter, nasty fat like the commercial stuff, so despite this darker color, it tasted great:
Admittedly, I'm a bit nutty about my bacon cooking, I even made a video:
it can also be found here with the associated blog post:
http://pixfiz.blogspot.com/2014/02/baconology.html
The first batch of homemade was nearly impossible to manage even at low heat, so I tried adding a cup of water to the pan the second time around. This seemed to work a bit better. Curious if you had any issues with frying it?
The difference in flavor from home-cured and smoked vs store bought is astounding. I made Oscar Meyer side by side that morning for an egg bake recipe (not wanting to use the 'good' bacon in the casserole) and the Oscar Meyer had a noticeable chemical-like aftertaste that had never stood out before in all the bacon experiments I've done. I doubt it is recognizable unless there is a side-by-side comparison, but that has been my experience with comparing bacon anyway, the subtle differences are lost unless they finish at the same time, I only met a few bacons I didn't like.
I signed up to follow your blog as we are also fans of meat smoking (and pizza making in a WFO) but our latest interest is sausage; can't wait!
Look forward to more bacon posts!
