how is bacon “smoked” but still raw?
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I mean, do you mean just “smoked” or actually “cured”.
Because “smoked” meat could simply be meat that spent a few minutes in a smoker so it gets some of those smells/flavors, but is still raw.
But “cured” meat is meat that has actually gone through a preservation process and is not “raw”. BUUUTTT, that doesn’t mean it’s 100% safe to eat like when it’s fully cooked, cured meat just doesn’t go bad as fast.
Or or or, you can also get cured meats that have been cured to the point that they actually are safe to eat directly out of the package.
A lot of bacon you buy at the store is “cold smoked,” where the temperature isn’t hot enough to cook the meat or fully kill all pathogens – it just adds a smoky flavor and helps to preserve the bacon, while leaving the meat raw.
You can buy nice quality bacon and other cured/smoked meats that are safe to eat raw. But bacon is fatty enough that we usually just want to cook it anyways, rendering out some of that fat and leaving us with something crispy, instead of greasy.
It’s not necessarily actually raw. You can use things besides heat to prepare food–acid, salt, smoke, even dehydrating. What bacon lacks, however, is the heat to ensure that all the microbes on/in it are rendered inert. Just as you can’t eat pork without cooking it, you have to cook bacon as well–this is specifically to sterilize it.
Cold smoking is a thing. Word is burned in an external firebox, and the smoke cooled (60 to 90 Fahrenheit) before it goes over the food. Smoked cheese is done this way as well.
You can sit near a campfire on a cold night and still be cold.
But the next morning your clothes still smell smokey.
Cold smoking is pretty common with meat and fish. That’s where you generate the smoke in a separate chamber from where the cooking is happening and the smoke is cycled into the chamber where the food is.
It’s an effective way of killing off any bacteria left on the surface of the meat after curing and makes it even more inhospitable to bacteria than just the salt/sugar from the cure alone.
Your question is instead “What does smoking food mean?”
If you have HBO Max, check out the Scrap Iron Chef episode of Good Eats for a full, more thorough explanation.
The answer is that bacon, as prepared and sold in the US, is partially cooked, but not fully cooked.
The first step in making bacon is the meat – a pork belly.
The next step is preparing the brine. This is the liquid that you soak the bacon in that preserves the meat. It’s a mixture of phosphates, nitrates, salt, sugar, and flavoring ingredients.
The next step is curing the pork belly. You do this by putting a skinned pork belly into the brine, and then leaving it there for a week or two, depending on how thick the belly is.
**steps up on soapbox** – *THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS UNCURED BACON. BACON REQUIRES THE CURING PROCESS. UNCURED BACON IS JUST COLD SMOKED PORK BELLY. THE PEOPLE WHO PACKAGE AND SELL “UNCURED BACON” ARE LYING LIARS WHO ARE LYING TO YOU.* **steps back down off soapbox**
The final step in making your bacon is smoking the now-cured pork belly. This is done to infuse the belly with the smoke flavor, as well as to preserve it additionally, to make it last longer. You ideally want to smoke bacon to an internal temp of about 120 degrees F, and to do this, you use a process called cold smoking, where the smoke is generated in another chamber and then piped over to the chamber where the bacon is parcooked.
Once this is done, you slice it, and you’re ready to fry it up and go to town.
Parcooking isn’t unique to bacon – there are lots of other things that are parcooked when you buy them, and then you finish the cooking process at home by bringing it to final cooked stage.
Bacon is smoked at a lower temperature than you would typically smoke meat to fully cook it. For example when I smoke a pork belly, I typically try and keep the temperature around 150°F and only smoke it for 3-4 hours. When I smoke a brisket, I smoke closer to 205°F and can easily keep it going 6-10 hours before I pull it.
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