Curing meat is an old and traditional method to preserve meat for storage. Not really necessary nowadays anymore but it's still done for the taste... cured and hot-smoked ham which turned into a buckboard bacon is really a delicious thing.
For the first test I took a piece of pork neck of approx. 1.8 kg, I didn't want to make it too big for the first time, just in case that I wouldn't like it.
For the curing rub I made a mixture of pickling salt, black pepper, brown sugar and some herbs, applied it to the meat which went to the 0°C shelf in the fride for about 2 weeks. After the curing process it was watered for approx. 2 hours to wash out a good part of the salt and left open in the fridge over night.
For the smoking I used some beech wood, glazed it with some maple syrup and added some marjoram... just keep it simple. The temperature was approx. 100 °C for the smoking time and I took out the meat at a core temperature of 63 °C, cooled it down and sliced it up...
My doubts regarding the taste were totally needless, the whole BBB was gone in a short time... and I repeated it with two pieces of meat 2.5 weeks later... instead of maple syrup and marjoram I used two different rubs... Onion Bomb and Red Dust. Different than the first one but also very tasty!
