Pork Jowl Confit

I had been up in Seattle recently and returned with a Cryovac sack of 5 pork jowls. I had never prepared jowls before, so I stuck them in the freezer and started to do a little research. After a little reading, Guanciale seemed like the most popular way of jowl preparation. With it being the middle of summer  I didn't think we had place in the house cool enough to let them air cure. I'll save that adventure for the fall or winter. I did learn that jowls are similar to belly. I've been wanting to do a confit of belly, so I decided to go for it with the jowls. I had a lot of pig fat in the freezer from trimmings so the first thing that needed to be done was to render us some fat. 

The above is bowl of cut up trimmings from various bacon cooks. There's also some fat back in there as well. All in all, I had about 6 pounds of fat.

I didn't want to stink up the house, so we rendered it out on the driveway in a Lodge pot. This process may seem a bit gross,  but rendering your own fat is a time honored tradition, and the stuff you make at home is actually quite good for you and isn't hydrogenated. 

 It's lower in saturated fat than butter and high in vitamin D. It's just got a bad name over the years, but I've got a feeling it will be making  more of come back as people  continue to pay more attention to what they eat.It's a simple process, and the results are good!

After a couple of hours, the fat begins to render. Its sort of a slow operation, but goodness takes time! The finish product, when cooled, is milky white. 

With the fat rendered, it was time to turn our attention to the jowls. I decided to do three of them and save the remaining  two for the winter. We had  made a simple brine of salt and sugar, and left the jowls alone for about 8 hours.

Heck, they look harmless enough. 

The 3 of them fit nicely in the Dutch oven. We covered them with the lard and headed outside to the smoker.

We placed the Dutch oven in a 200 degree smoker and let the jowls cook for about 6 hours. Afterwards, we brought them in  and let them cool for a bit before transferring  into a dish.  We then covered them with the fat and plastic wrap. We placed a couple of rocks on top of the plastic to help flatten the jowls out and stuck them in the fridge to cool and firm them up. In hindsight, I think  maybe we should have anchored them down some how during the cooking process to try to keep them flat as they had a tendency to curl. I'm not sure if that would have helped, or maybe been a hindrance, as they were very tender when done cooking. They may have fallen apart under too much weight - I'm not sure.

The next day, we took them out of the fridge, reserved the lard and cut the jowls into squares. To prepare them, we sauteed fat side down for about 20 minutes, then baked for another 15 on the Weber gas grill. We served them with grilled scallops and some nice sides. Not bad for a first attempt!