Bacon Worth Finding

It started with Christmas presents

Before Greyskull, Sean was making bacon at home for fun.

He’s a chef, a barbecue obsessive, and apparently the sort of person who thinks cured pork makes a sensible Christmas present.

So friends started getting homemade bacon.

A few weeks later, on holiday in January, the idea that became Greyskull appeared: Daniel’s coffee and Sean’s bacon sandwiches, together, as a pop-up.

Coffee and bacon. That was basically the pitch.

Finding our bacon

Before we opened, we decided the bacon had to become more than just Sean’s homemade bacon.

It needed to be Greyskull’s bacon.

So we went the whole hog: different cures, different herbs and spices, different woods, nitrate-free versions and naturally cured versions.

We invited friends over to make pigs of themselves trying all our bacon.

Some experiments worked.

Some absolutely did not.

There were, admittedly, a few rash decisions.

Eventually, we stopped trying to make the bacon clever and started paying more attention to the pork.

Start with a better pig

We now start with locally reared rare-breed pork, chosen for its flavour and marbling rather than simply because it is going to become bacon.

This isn’t anonymous pork bought because we happen to be turning it into bacon.

It’s the sort of pork you’d happily make the centrepiece of a roast.

There probably aren’t that many bacon sandwiches starting with pork this fancy.

Once we did that, the way we thought about the cure changed too.

When the meat is that good, you don’t want to cover it up.

The cure should make the pork taste better, not make the pork taste like the cure.

The secret bit

Our cure is our own blend of herbs and spices, and we keep the exact recipe to ourselves.

But the point of it isn’t secrecy for the sake of it.

The blend is there to deepen the flavour of the bacon without announcing itself.

You shouldn’t be sitting there playing spot the spice.

You should just think: that is really good bacon.

Why beech?

We’d always smoked food with the sort of woods you’d expect from people who are into barbecue.

Then we noticed a bacon producer we respected using beech, tried it ourselves, and something clicked.

Beech doesn’t make the bacon taste aggressively smoky.

It gives it a softer, sweeter, more complex smoke that sits behind the pork instead of shouting over it.

Good pork. Our cure. Beech smoke.

That became Greyskull bacon.

The bits that usually get thrown away

When the pork bellies arrive, the skin and rib bones come with them.

We pay for those bits whether we use them or put them in the bin.

So we use them.

The ribs are what butchers call shiners. They’re cut tight to the bone so as much of the good meat as possible stays where we want it: on the belly.

That means they’re pretty disappointing if what you want is a rack of barbecue ribs.

They are, however, brilliant for stock.

The skin gets dried and turned into crackling, which we serve with our bacon rolls.

The shiners go into pork stock, which works its way back into gravies and sauces elsewhere in the kitchen.

It isn’t nose to tail. It’s just not being wasteful.

And when the pork is this good, throwing perfectly useful bits of it away feels particularly ridiculous.

It’s very fancy pork for a bacon sandwich.

That’s the point.