It’s been a busy few months here at the hacienda with making homemade and wood smoked Kamado Joe bacon. Making your own bacon at home is a super easy life-skill to master. We consumers find it all too easy to pick up that cellophane wrapped cardboard framed package at the big-box store. Let’s rediscover some of those everyday commonplace food preservation skills our Grandparents relied on for sustenance.

Kamado Joe Bacon

I have been working the final changes on my latest book, tentatively titled: Backyard Bacon Guide: Making Your Own, Making It Better. I’m still working on the cover design, I want something more bacon like.

Our ancestors had mastered these essential food preservation skills. We modern day consumers, well we just climb in our gas-guzzlers and drive a block down the road to the grab-and-go big-box emporium to pick up some prepackaged convenience item we probably don’t even really need.

We should all learn and practice self-sufficiency skills! While doing stuff outside, as is the theme of this website, relying on one’s own wits is paramount. When the lights go out, what is your plan? What will you do? More on that topic in the near future!

As I was researching traditional food preservation techniques, I stumbled across a number of vintage cookbooks.

– The White House Cook Book, 1887 edition
– Housekeeping in Old Virginia, 1879 edition
– The Compleat Housewife, 1739 edition
– The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, 1774 edition
– The Prairie Traveler, A Hand-Book for Overland Expeditions, 1863 edition
– Home Pork Making, 1900 edition

You can pick up some new, old-fangled cooking know-how thumbing through these timeworn tomes. Check them out.

Okay, I’ve now got about 25 pounds Kamado Joe bacon in the freezer, all nestled away in space-age vacuum sealed stasis. I could eat bacon 24/7, but doing so is probably not a good idea.

This first volume of my book has bacon-making recipes for:
– Traditional bacon
– Honey cure bacon
– Maple cure bacon
– Maple whisky cure bacon
– Molasses cure bacon
– Tabasco bacon
– Chipotle bacon
– Sriracha bacon

I had to stop there, as I needed to get this book out the door and up on Amazon. I am pretty particular on editing and formatting, the grunt work.

The glamorous bacon chef job, well, I just don’t have that much time lately.

I have a few more Kamado Joe bacon making recipe ideas that I want to try. They will be published right here on my blog first. All of these recipes are Paleo lifestyle oriented, but those not so regimented will find them just as tantalizing.

A Kamado Joe cooker isn’t a requirement for this book. Any smoker, grill capable of indirect heat where you can maintain a temperature close to 225 ⁰F (108⁰ C) and south of 275 ⁰F (130 ⁰C), for 2 to 4 hours will do the trick.