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I have difficulty getting pork belly or jowl for pancetta and guanciale. Finally, out of frustration, I used a pancetta type cure on some fairly fatty pork chops with the bone removed, and I just hung them in my curing chamber. Has anyone tried this? I'm not sure what I'm going to end up with, but hopefully, it will taste like the leaner bits found on a pancetta. I hope to use it diced up in recipes. My concerns are the thinness of the chops and the possibility of mold on the lean pork. I currently have a batch of sopressata which has a very full covering of good mold in the chamber.

The general idea for the cure was salt, pink salt (cure no. 1), bay leaf, juniper berries, black pepper, white pepper, garlic.

Any predictions on what I will end up with?

Not sure what you will end up with but seeing you are in the North East US are there any oriental grocery stores near by? THey are a great source for Pork Belly!!

Have you tried curing the fat cap off of shoulder butt, AKA Poor Man's Bacon?
Here's one that I made, wrapped around some collar....




~Martin

I live in the rural part of the northeast--no asian markets nearby. Most of the asians I know travel a couple of hours to get most of their asian groceries. I can get locally farmed belly on occasion, but it's around $9.00 us per pound. I'll have to try the fat cap off a shoulder. That looks good. I also have to buy a whole butt to get the collar. Nobody around here cuts it.

I did some internet surfing, and it looks like the closest thing to what I'm doing is buckboard bacon, although mine won't be smoked. As most of you probably know, buckboard bacon is a leaner chunk or slice of pork cured like bacon and smoked like bacon. It apparently results in a cross between ham and bacon.

I plan to use mine for cooking, but I don't intend to pre cook it or smoke it. When I make pancetta, I sometimes have a little bit of it raw, but I don't make a habit out of it.

So my chops have been hanging for a few days, and they are drying out some, although still a little sticky. I did not innoculate them with mold, and none is growing on them yet. There is mold on my sopressata, which has been hanging about three weeks, and I would expect some of it to transfer over. I plan to wipe it off with a brine if it does, as I'm not a fan of mold on things that aren't in casings, even if it's good mold.

After a couple of weeks, I tried one of the chops I cured with a pancetta cure. Actually, it was a small scrap that was too big to toss, so I put it in the chamber with the bigger chops. Ittasted like cured meat, and was more like lonzino than anything else. It ended up about 3/8 of an inch thick. The problem is that there isn't much use for it. It's too lean to use in recipes, as it toughens up quickly. The larger chops may not have cured through, and they smelled slightly funkier than I was comfortable with, so I tossed them. I think I'll stick to using chops for sausage meat. On a brighter note, I used the idea of curing the fat cap off a shoulder, and have a 1.5 lb mini pancetta in the works, along with a nice coppa and a quasi-coppa, which is the other half of the meat mass left after deboning the butt and cutting out the coppa piece. I was amazed at how little waste there was. After the fat cap and the two solid pieces, I had a pound and a half of nice shoulder pieces and made some breakfast sausage. The only waste was the bone and a tiny amount of grissel.