While setting traps this season, we noticed an abundance of young river birches bearing the scars of beaver activity. Some of the chew marks were super fresh, the sap wood still sticky. This got us thinking about tapping trees and making syrup (something we have no experience with) but the idea of making syrup from local trees and using it with meat from the same land sounded right up our alley.

We looked into tapping trees on the way home, then we remembered that we had a small bottle of birch syrup that was sent to us from a friend in Maine. We decided to cure a beaver hindquarter with the syrup and treat it like bacon. Birch beaver bacon- it had a nice ring to it.

We mixed the birch syrup into the cure, and after a week in the fridge we smoked it for 6 hours on a pellet grill. This birch beaver bacon is dark and earthy with a great balance of salt and sweetness. The birch syrup is a nice change from the maple syrup we usually use in our bacon. It adds a dark sweetness that works really well with the beaver meat.

Because we heat the meat up to 140F during the smoking process, you can carve it and eat it like a ham, but we think it's better sliced and allowed to crisp in a pan. The sugar caramelizes and you really get that salty-sugary bacon flavor and texture. We love it with eggs or chunked up and browned with onions and garlic for any kind of soup that likes smoke. Once the greens come in, we’ll cook some with this bacon, and once we’re into summer, B-BLTs.

Birch Syrup Beaver Bacon

As always, we use metric measurements and go by percentage weight for our charcuterie recipes. We do this to make the recipes easy to scale and replicate exactly, batch after batch. If you’re thinking of getting into charcuterie making and don’t own a kitchen scale, please do yourself the favor of buying one. They’re inexpensive relative to the cash outlay of all the other equipment you’ll need to pick up, and will save you a lot of effort in terms of scaling recipes into imperial measurements. To measure your ingredients, first weigh the meat you are using, and then calculate the weight of all the other ingredients based on the weight of the meat.

Prep time: 30 minutes, inactive 7 days

Cook time: 5-8 hours

Ingredients:

1 beaver hind quarter, bone in

2.5% salt

1% sugar

1% birch syrup

.25% instacure #1

.25% black pepper, coarse 

Method:

Trim the meat of connective tissue and silverskin. If present, leave the layer of fat intact.

Mix the cure ingredients and evenly coat the meat. Place the meat in a vacuum bag and seal. Refrigerate for 7 days. Rotate daily.

At the end of the curing period, rinse with cold water and pat dry (don't worry if some of the cure remains on the meat).

Smoke on a low heat setting for 4-6 hours, then increase the temperature for a final 1-2 hours until the internal temperature hits 140F. 

Refrigerate to cool. Slice and crisp in the pan like any other bacon.