Homemade Beef Bacon

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4.67 from 9 votes

Homemade beef bacon is a delicious alternative to pork bacon, and it's surprisingly easy to make at home.

Prep Time30

Cook Time5

Slow Cook Time4

Total Time5 4 30

Author: Ashley Adamant

Equipment

Ingredients

For 5 pounds of trimmed meat (2270 g, or 2.27 kg), you'll need:

4 1/2 Tbsp. Fine Sea Salt 68 g, or 3% weight of the meat
3 Tbsp. Sugar 34 g, or 1.5% weight of meat
1 tsp. Instant Cure #1 5 g, or .25% weight of meat

Instructions

Start by trimming the meat to remove any hanging pieces, leaving a nice even chunk. Weigh the meat to calculate the amount of cure needed.
Mix the cure.
Cover the meat on all sides with the cure. Place the cure in a ziplock bag or vacuum sealer bag and add any remaining cure to the bag.
Place the meat in the refrigerator for 5 days to cure, flipping daily.
After curing, remove the meat from the refrigerator and rinse off any remaining cure.
(Oven Instructions) Preheat your oven to 200 degrees F (93 C). Place the meat on a tray in the oven with a drip tray underneath. Cook until the internal temperature of the meat reaches 150 F (65 C). This should take 4 to 6 hours, depending on the size/shape of the meat. (Grill and Smoker instructions in notes.)
Remove the meat from the oven and cool completely before slicing. Ideally, place it in the refrigerator for 24 hours.
Slice the meat as thin as possible. (Beef bacon, unlike pork bacon, doesn't do well in thick slices.)
Fry the bacon until crisp (or your desired level of doneness).

Notes

Cure Amounts

While I would suggest weighing the cure for best results, you can approximate.

As a rough guide, for each pound of meat, you'll want:

1 Tbsp. Salt (fine sea salt)
3/4 Tbsp. Sugar
scant 1/4 tsp Instant Cure #1

Beef Bacon on the Grill

To make it on the grill, soak wood chips in water and then drain.

Preheat your charcoal grill and let the coals burn down until they have an even red glow and a steady heat (no flare-ups). Then push the coals all the way to one side, as far from the meat as possible.

In a gas grill, just turn the burner farthest from the meat all to its lowest setting.

On charcoal, place the damp wood chips right on the coals and it should give you a nice even white smoke. In a gas grill, you'll need one of these cast-iron smoking boxes to hold the chips (but they work great).

Slow cook the bacon until it reaches an internal temperature of 150 degrees.

Smoker

If you happen to have a smoker, that's the traditional way to make bacon (though oven or grill work well too).

Smoke the beef bacon for several hours at around 200 degrees (93 C), until the meat reached an internal temperature of 150 degrees F (65 C).