I made bacon yesterday.

Not in any sort of figurative sense, either. I quite literally made bacon.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details because I basically followed this guy’s recipe, with a little help from this guy’s recipe, and so there’s already plenty of details online about how to cure and smoke bacon. It goes like this:

1) Acquire pork belly. This was by far the hardest part. I could only find one place in Westchester that had any — a Latin market in White Plains. I was hoping for a five-pound slab, but he only had a couple two-pound pieces left, but whatever, bacon is bacon, so I took ’em.

Then you rub salt and brown sugar on the pork belly:

Then you stick it in plastic bags in the fridge for a week to let it cure. The salt draws moisture out of the pork. Osmosis. This is exciting because it’s like a delicious science project.

After a week, you rinse the pork belly and smoke the pork belly for a few hours. I used hickory, because that’s the standard in bacon-smoking. A lot of people say, “oh, use applewood” because you hear “applewood-smoked bacon” a lot. But I’m pretty sure you only note “applewood-smoked bacon” because it sounds fancy when it comes from Wendy’s, and because noting that it’s applewood-smoked is distinguishing it from most bacon, which is hickory smoked. And since this is my first foray into smoking bacon, I figured I’d use old reliable hickory.

Three hours of low-heat smoking later, we have bacon. Sort of.

You know how bacon comes with the disclaimer that it’s only partially cooked? That’s the case here, as well. So it’s a little disappointing, because you can’t just rip into it right off the smoker and start eating delicious bacon. Also, that’s actual pigskin on the top there, so you’ve got to slice that off before you slice up the bacon for cooking.

And then, fear. Since I didn’t use saltpeter, the bacon doesn’t have its familiar pink color once I start slicing into it, and I grow concerned that I’ve just made straight-up hickory-smoked pork somehow. Which would still be cool, you know, but not bacon:

But I had no reason to worry. It’s bacon, alright. Shorter than most bacon, due to the size of the slab. And I burned it a little the first time cooking it — probably because, since I have no meat slicer, I had to slice it a bit thicker than regular store-bought bacon and it screwed with my bacon-cooking mojo — but it was still pretty obviously bacon:

As for the taste? Delicious, of course. It’s bacon. The best bacon I’ve ever had? No, probably not. But really good bacon regardless. Better than run-of-the-mill bacon, even (as if such a thing exists!).

It’s a bit salty even for bacon, and I think next time I’ll use a little more brown sugar to cut the salt more, or experiment with maple syrup. But no matter. What’s important is that I’ve moved from purely a consumer of bacon to a consumer and producer of bacon. I have lessened, by some tiny degree, the size of my bacon footprint.

According to this article, the average American, as of 2007, ate 17.9 pounds of bacon a year. That’s nuts. I initially figured I eat more bacon than the average American, but playing with rough estimates in my head, I really don’t think there’s any way I eat more than 1.5 pounds of bacon a month. And I really f@#$ing love bacon.

That means, especially when you factor in vegetarians and health-nuts and all the people who bring the average way down, there must be people who just eat bacon all the time. Like I mean really all the time. Like people who spend every waking hour eating bacon, driving up our national bacon-consumption rates. And bully for you, bacon eaters. I have nothing but respect for the choices you’ve made.

I will eat more than 1.5 pounds of bacon this month, I am certain, and so my efforts to cut into my bacon deficit will be mitigated by all this bacon I just made available to me.

But I will give some of this bacon away, too. For the first time in my life, I will give back to the world some tiny fraction of all the bacon I have taken from it.

Finally, I have joined the ranks of the baconmakers.