Dry brine

• Mix all the ingredients of the brine! You can easily vary the added flavours as long as you respect the base of minus 3-4% curing salt of the total meat weight.
• Rub the brine thoroughly with the salt and place it in a vacuum bag. Make sure that all the salt from your brine mix goes into the bag. Vacuum the meat with a food saver.
• Place the meat in the refrigerator for 4-5 days. When curing a larger piece of meat, it may take up to 3 weeks for the curing salt to penetrate to the core.
• Remove the brine from the bag rinse the piece of meat with water and pat dry. Now you are ready for smoking.

Cold smoking

• Fill your cold smoke generator with beech moth, but don't push it. Experience shows that the coarser pieces of smoke moth go out. You can buy very fine sawdust or grind the coarser pieces in a blender.
• Light the sawdust with a fire torch or candle. As soon as you obtain a thin blue smoke, place the meat on your grill and smoke the piece for 10 hrs.
• Attention: for safety reasons, the dome temperature may not exceed 25°C. Otherwise bacteria get the chance to grow...
• After 10 hours of smoking, remove the bacon from the BBQ.

Drying of the Guanciale

• Roll the smoked throat bacon in a muslin and knot carefully with kitchen string.
• Hang the packed pieces of guanciale in your fridge to dry. Make sure that the pieces of meat don't touch each other and the wall of the fridge to prevent spoilage.
• Let the meat dry until it has lost 30% of its weight. These are the meat juices that are extracted from the meat leaving you with a delicious piece of bacon with a delicious concentrated flavor.

The homemade Guanciale is ready to use! Serve in fine slices as an appetizer or use the pork bacon as a base for your pasta sauce. Tasty!