how is bacon “smoked” but still raw?
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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.
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