Yin-Yang Bacon

One night while eating Chinese food I started to reflect on all these fabulous ingredients and it hit me...."I must create something!!!!" That's how most of my recipes come to me while eating food or watching TV. So I pondered away and I let my creative inclinations kick in. I have been eating Asian food all my life so this can't be that difficult. What ever I was going to make it had to be original.

Than it hit me like a ton of bricks. I wonder how Bacon would taste with Asian ingredients? I love Bacon and Asian food and I cook it and eat it often so why not. If you ask me it's a match made in heaven. I offer my version of Asian Bacon here so enjoy. 

So why the name Yin-Yang? For that

you have to click on the link to first find out what Yin-Yang means but I will give you an abridged definition. Simple Chinese philosophy describes Yin-Yang as opposite or contrary forces that appears contradictory but actually gives rise to each other as they interrelate to to each other. The ingredients in this recipe definitely are a Yin-Yang. 

Easy recipe to follow. Click on the link to the left to get dry cure instructions

First thing I did was measure exactly what I needed. Here is a cool pic of some of my ingredients. 

Pictures are worth a thousand words.

Using a Mortar and Pestle was really cool.  I could have used a food processor to accomplish the same thing but this was so much better. Feeling the ingredients getting pulverized through the pestle was awesome.  I felt connected with the ingredients. Yes I know that sounds weird.  

 

Well by now you all know I don't eat Pork so this is of course Boneless Short-Ribs I purchased at Costco. Short-Ribs are an excellent choice for Bacon because of the fat content. For those of you unfamiliar with my other numerous Bacon projects you can click HERE!!

 I place whole spices in a dry skillet and heat them through to release their essential oils than used a spice grinder to pulverize them. 

I combined the salt and Cure#1 and coated the meat thoroughly getting it into every nook and cranny. I than combined all the spices, herbs and dextrose and coated the meat exactly as stated above. After meat was nicely coated I added the ingredients from the mortar and pestle and lathered the meat up. 

The Shaoxing wine, Sesame seed oil and the Fish sauce was mixed together and placed in Vacuum sealed bag where it will sit for 21 days (until May 9, 2014) being flipped everyday. Afterwards I will cold smoke Bacon in Apple wood.  

So after careful consideration I felt that the very thick short-ribs had been cured after 18 days. As you can see from the picture I rinsed off all of the cure. Now on to the cold smoker. 

I cold smoked that Short-Ribs for 6 hours using Applet pellets. I used a product called A-MAZE-N-PELLET-SMOKER to cold smoke.  So easy to use and it really does not generate much heat at all. 

Bacon all sliced up!! Here are my thoughts on this Asian Bacon experiment. The Bacon came out OK, just OK mind you nothing incredible or over the top. I need to rework the recipe so the Asian Flavors come out. I am also going to reduce the salt % especially since I used fish sauce which has a lot of salt. The Bacon could have been a little sweeter too. Back to the drawing board I go!!!

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