Buckboard Bacon/Cottage Bacon.....

[TasunkaWitko]

Educate me, please - what's the difference between the two?

Also, what is a good, solid introductory recipe/method for each? By basic, I mean basically just cure, salt and sugar (per pound) - I'll be using Tenderquick. Nothing exotic or off the beaten path, please - i need to keep it as basic and as fundamental as possible, for the first attempt, or i get confused!

[barkonbutts]

Think we need Rich for this one but he is MIA!!! wonder if he has started posting as a different person....

[BBQ Engineer]

Cottage bacon is thinly sliced lean pork meat from a shoulder cut that is typically oval shaped and meaty. It is cured and then sliced into round pieces for baking or frying.

Typically pork belly is used for bacon but when pork butt or pork loin is used for bacon it is called Buckboard bacon.

For some awesome BBB, check out Chefrob's post

Meathunter also had an awesome post...let me look...here

Here's one I did...Here and Here

If you have never had BBB, it is awesome stuff...now get after it!

[TasunkaWitko]

hey, thanks for the clarification, and those do look good!

[TasunkaWitko]

i'm thinking hard about trying some buckboard bacon, using a 4-ish-pound boned-out shoulder. if i try it, i'll be using tenderquick, which has salt built in, and i'll see about a combination of brown sugar and maple-syrup or mapleine, which seemed to work pretty well during my canadian bacon experiment.

basically, it looks like doing this isn't much more different than the dried beef project that i did - which is pretty dang similar to ham. so then i gotta wonder - what's the difference, other than the body parts involved, between buckboard bacon and ham?

[TasunkaWitko]

ha HA ~ chefrob answered my question for me (difference between bacon and ham) ~ and did an excellent job of it ~ almost a year ago! check it out:

Originally posted by ChefRob the BaconGod:

a couple of years ago i would have said bacon is bacon or bacon is belly. after doing a lot of buckboard i have found that i can produce a bacon from butt that at times most could not tell what part of the pig it came from by butterflying and trimming. if i left it whole i get that "hammieness" that i am not looking for. i don't think you can use a cured and smoked hind quarter, slice it thin and fry it up and think it resembles bacon in any way. with out the fat streaking through it, it can't cook up crisp and give you the same flavor, texture, and mouth feel. i have not done a ham yet but i would venture to say that it can't take on the same amount of smoke as say a belly or butterflied butt due to the surface area vs. non surface area. with this in mind i think bacon tends to take on more characteristics and nuances of the different smokes from different woods as well and is just a plain smokier product. by the same token i feel that this is also what gives ham it's flavor definition by being having more cured meat than surface smoked meat. i think final preparation plays a roll as well as the specific cut involved, but i don't think you can take one of my BBB and stud it with cloves and pineapple rings (i never do this BTW) and pass that off as ham.

excellent!

[DanMcG]

Cottage bacon is a new one on me, But a cottage ham it the cured coppa off the top of the shoulder, that group of small muscles that form a cylinder shaped chunk.
Makes an excellent ham bacon.

[TasunkaWitko]

trying to decide between doing a porchetta, which looks really good, or doing buckboard bacon, which looks wonderful as well. both would be new projects, but manageable.

i'm thinking since i'm doing the pernil for the cubanos at the same time this weekend, there's no reason to go into pork overload ~ so i might as well do the bbb and let it cure for a week or however long it takes. and then HOPEFULLY be able to do the smoking next weekend. as for the porchetta, i can get a boneless pork shoulder again at a later time and do the it over charcoal/wood/ with a little smoke to get some real goodness in there.

[shellbellc]

From the sausage maker, the maple cure I use for my bellies is what they actually sell as a ham cure. But I agree that I think the amount of cured meat to smoked surface meat is what plays a big difference in ham vs bacon.