We visited our friend John out in San Angelo earlier this week and he gifted us a 5 1/2 lb slab of apple wood smoked bacon. Our freezer is full, so we had to cook it this weekend. Dang it. I'm still looking for the tenderness Don Green gets on his pork belly bites so this will be an experimental batch. Previously we had smoked the pork belly then wrapped tightly in foil and finished in the oven. That still didn't have the tenderness factor. This time we will smoke for 3 hours, chop them up, then finish in a crock pot for as long as it takes. We'll see how that works out.
We sliced it as super thick bacon slices, maybe 3X extra thick bacon. We are smoking with oak and pecan from our yard, as usual. We'll add sauce once it hits the crock pot.
After 3 hours on the smoker here's what we found.
A few samples found that some more tenderizing was needed so we chopped it up into small bites.
Into the crock pot they went along with my last bottle of Dr Pepper BBQ sauce. We'll let the crock pot work its magic for a couple of hours and check and see how they're doing.
After 3 hours in a crockpot tenderness was achieved. However I learned we should probably leave the bites un-sauced til the very end. We'll be enjoying the experiment with some rice for the next few days.
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