This is part of our 100 Things in 2015 challenge. Here’s the full list.

For the past few years, we’ve been trying really hard to know where our food comes from. We’ve done pretty well by joining CSAs and going to farmers markets, but there’s one item that was still lacking: bacon. The Costco stuff is just too good.

But then, while looking through the PCC community education catalog, I spotted the entry for bacon school. It only took me a minute to sign up.

The class is taught by Zeph at Proletariat Butchery. There were five students, and he set us all up with a pork shoulder, a variety of spices, and a couple of baggies.

The way you make bacon is to (1) salt it, (2) salt it again after about a week, (3) dry it out after another week, and (4) smoke it after yet another week. We mixed our salts and applied the first dusting that night.

And left with this: a baggie of meat whose juice was already being sucked out by the salt.

After a week, I rinsed it, salted it again, and put it back into its baggie. Another week, another rinse, and it sat in the open (refrigerator) air for a week. After that, I took it back to Zeph for smoking.

And later that day, I grabbed the kids and took them back there to pick it up. Zeph had a treat for the kids: a pigs head.

Here’s the finished product. It’s super fragrant and smoky, so we have to keep it in a sealed container or the carrots will smell like bacon.

But it fries up real good.

It’s possible that I’ve found a hobby.