I came across a recipe [1] for salt curing without doing a water rinse after curing. The idea of using only enough salt to cure the meat made a lot of sense to me, most recipes end up with way too much salt that you have to wash off afterwards.

I stuck with the 2.5% by weight ratio of salt to bacon. We have a nice chamber vacuum sealer so I used that to seal the meat while curing it. I don't have a slicer unfortunately, but partially freezing the slab right before slicing made it easy enough. Slicing soft pork fat is no fun, getting the meat a bit stiff and icy works wonders when slicing!

On the first batch I used maple syrup basically the same as the recipe. The author noted wanting to double the amount of syrup - I stuck with 2% by weight and it was almost too sweet for me, I wouldn't do more.

I actually just sliced and packaged another slab tonight. For this one I did half as much syrup and did a pretty strong costing of cracked black pepper. No clue how it will turn out, but it smelled great when slicing it! I'll probably try a few slices tomorrow morning before freezing most of it for later.

[1] https://tasteofartisan.com/how-to-cure-bacon/