After success making several fancy salts including Sriracha, smoked, and green chili I've decided to try to move in to stranger and tastier territories. As such I want to make a bacon salt. The commercial products don't use real bacon (or at least the ones I've seen) and all the do-it-yourself recipes claim it not to be shelf stable.
My hope was that cooking the bacon crisp would remove a majority of the moisture, preserving something akin to jerky. Once cooked it would be pulverized and adding have a large amount of kosher salt added to it, many times that than the weight of bacon used. I would hope that these preservation techniques being used two-fold would help make said meat candy shelf-stable.
However I worry that there is risk of some of the greases in the pulverized bacon going rancid. Is there anything I can do short of keeping it in the fridge or heat preserving the entire concoction, or is my plan likely to work?
Best Answer
Remember that the whole reason we cure bacon is to make it shelf stable over time, a process developed before refrigeration was as it is today. Now we do it more for taste, but the salt and curing process make bacon pretty shelf stable. If you are cooking the bacon as well, before you put it in the salt, I don't see any reason not to leave the bacon salt on the counter.
I'd try leaving it on the shelf until you noticed any issues. But I'm willing to live a little more dangerously than some others. :)