Buckboard Bacon Flavor

If your not smoking until mothers day you can put a thin coating of honey or maple syrup on now and after you soak the meat add a thin coat before you smoke it. Using 1 to 2oz of wood to smoke is plenty. Go lightly first then you can add more to the next time until you get it the eay you want it. Since it really does't take that long to smoke you might want to consider doing two batches on Sunday. Do the first one with 1oz of wood and fry a piece up to see if you need more smoke with you second batch.
wood chunks and chips burn at a different rate so figure out what you will need from there. The amount of wood I mentioned above is for wood chunks.

Neuske's is indeed good and fairly smokey - used to get it at a lot of stores while living in Milwaukee Used to offer butt bacon. I too would be pretty darn happy to get anywhere near their flavor.

There's been a lot of bacon discussion here during '04, maybe you've read all that already. Generally there seem to be 3 ways to go, both for curing and smoking:

Cures:
1. Kits. HiMtn seems to be most popular.
2. Homade dry cures. Jackitup posted a very straightforward method in the recipe forum; I've used it a few times and have a chunk curing now.
3. Brine cures like the scrap iron bacon recipe. Have not tried these for bacon myself.

Smoking:
1. True cold smoking.
2. Hot smoking until fully cooked. If planning to eat without further cooking, ie Canadian bacon, this is what I'd do.
3. Sort of lukewarm smoking to 125F or so.

How did you do your first bacon?

Anyhow, all this doesn't answer your question.

If using a dry cure, it'd be easy enough to either add a dry sugar like brown sugar, turbinado, maple sugar, or whatever before sprinkling it on. As to how much to add, probably quite a bit. My most recent attempt is 2 parts sugar and 3 parts salt. I used around 2 Tbsp total, so I'd have to add at least a teaspoon of sugar to make much difference. I suspect these really good Midwestern style bacons are cured with a huge amount of sugar.

I don't see why you couldn't use honey or syrup by drizzling it on after sprinkling on a dry cure.

Washing out during soaking shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. After all, it's still plenty salty. You could try painting on after soaking and before smoking, but there's so little surface area once you slice the bacon that I don't think it'll help much.

Also, Allied-Kenco and PS Seasonings and probably others sell "Sweeter Than Sweet Cure" intended for ham but could probably be adapted to bacon.

Last time I did BB Bacon, coated a 5 lb cured & rubbed butt about 1/2 way through the smoke with a mix made up of 1 cup maple syrup, 1/2 cup honey, and 2 tbs. freshly ground black pepper. The coating provided a really great taste.

Also, I used 2 oz. chunk of hickory. I definately would not use any more and might even cut it back a little.

Here's the update....first of all I was using Hi-Mtn dry cure, total cure time 14 days. The last 4 days I rubbed with brown sugar and covered with honey. After the 2-hour water soak, air dry and 1 hour pre-smoke at 140F , I painted on a mixture of honey and maple syrup. Smoked at 200F with a small amount of apple wood chips...probably an ounce or so to 130F internal...temp rose to 153F after I pulled the plug, but did not open the smoker.
The results were much better than my first try, great apple wood flavor, but as I suspected not much sweetness if any at all. Will keep trying and thanks for your help.