Why can’t I buy lamb belly? Why do I feel too weird I tell my halal butcher that I want to make lamb bacon, so I need it?  He sold me lamb ribs, which I thought might be a good time to try out some of the transglutaminase which I just bought.  That’s meat glue if you’re not into big words.  So I deboned the ribs, sprinkled on some TG RM and put them into the refrigerator overnight wrapped in plastic wrap and under some weights (Oh scratch off lotto tickets please buy me a minipack mvs35xp).  I took it out of the plastic wrap and rubbed it in a standard curing salt rub with some curry powder, spices, etc added.  Refrigerated it for 5 or six days in a cambro.  I got out my bradley smoker to smoke it and found out that my heating element had died over the winter.  Rats.  Double rats.  Shit, even.

I always thought the bradley was a bit underpowered anyways, and having a PID controller left over from my original diy circulator, I grangered and mcmastered a better heating element and wired it up.  Not the prettiest smoker, but it worked.  I’ll do a post on it once I put it together in a way that’s vaguely safe.  The lamb bacon was smoked, and sliced, and fried, and foul.  The flavor was pretty good, but texture-wise it was a mess-stringy and disgusting.  Probably a terrible cut of lamb to use for it, foreign butcher panic got to me.  Maybe I’ll try again later.  I still think a Lamb bacon BLT would be pretty good.