Collaborative Bacon, Part 2

As you may remember from this post, Jess Watsky (Foodette) suddenly appeared last week bearing the two most important ingredients for making bacon:

1. A pork belly
2. A desire to make bacon

Curing the bacon took about four days, from Sunday afternoon until Thursday night when I removed it from the cryovac pouch in which it slept, gave the belly a rinse under cool running water and picked off any remaining spice bits. I set it on a few paper towels and patted it dry, and later I set it aside in the cool pantry  covered with a loose-knit cotton dishtowel. The idea was to age the belly, allowing more of the moisture to evaporate out of it before sending it to the smoker.

By the time Jess arrived on Saturday, the bacon was ready to go. The fat was dryer and waxy, and the lean had firmed and darkened in color.

For comparison's sake, I trimmed a few thin slices off of one end and fried them up crispy in a small skillet. Simple, unsmoked (or "green") bacon. The flavor was delicious: bacony to be sure, but with just a hint of the juniper berries and a slight sharp edge from the mustard seed. Jess' choices for seasoning were great. So I added a couple of meat hooks to the thick end, and we hung it in the smoker for a little quality time with some smouldering apple wood.

I set the fire in the smoker to low and started the chips. To prevent a big heat build-up around the meat, I set an heavy aluminum baker's tray above the burner. We kept the temperature very low (less than 200F) and left the side to hang and smoke for 3 hours.

After chilling the side for about half an hour in the freezer to firm it up a bit, I brought out my slicer and we cut it 18 slices to the pound. Because the side was on the small side, this was just right for moderately-thick slices. We made up 1-pound packages.

Jess was really happy with the end results. She's still got another side from that Berkshire pig. We're thinking maybe making some pancetta next.

Collaborative Bacon, Part 1

Photo by Foodette

Last week I got a message from Jess Watsky (aka the famous Foodette.) Seems she had a big ol' pile of pig meat which included a belly, and she was wondering if I could find some time to show her how to turn that belly into bacon.

But of course!

I had recently been enchanted by her recent foray into offal, a slow-roasted pig's head - the creation of which she detailed on her blog, Foodette Reviews.

Another photo stolen from Foodette

And that is how it came to be that on a fine Sunday afternoon, Jess, Lynnafred, Maryanne, and I gathered around my kitchen table with a propane torch, singeing the bristles off a wonderful Berkshire pork belly.

I prepped a bowl of basic bacon cure - 2 parts kosher salt, 1 part demerara sugar, 1 generous tablespoon of curing salt - in a bowl. We added seasonings: sweet Hungarian paprika, freshly cracked black pepper, mustard seed, juniper berries and home-grown bay leaves crushed in a mortar.

And then Jess and I donned food-service gloves and gently rubbed the salt mixture into the pork before vacuum sealing it into a plastic time capsule not to be opened until Saturday.

Photo by Dave. For a change.

The salt had already started working its magic by Sunday night. Every now and then I'd take the package out and massage it a little. As the salt draws moisture from the meat, a brine forms in the bag. Although it had only been a few hours, a noticeable brine was already pooling up the the spaces by the meat.

Join us later in the week as we continue the adventure.

REVIEW: McDonald's New CBO (Cheddar Bacon Onion) Sandwiches

A strange thing happened over the weekend: Maryanne and I were out wandering in the car at lunchtime, and found ourselves looking for a quick bite to eat at the very moment that a McDonald's appeared on the road ahead.

Now, you guys all know how much I like McDonald's breakfast and bakery offerings. But you also know I am somewhat less-than-enthusiastic about their burgers. Maryanne kind of half-heartedly said, "There's a McDonald's up on the right," and I think I really surprised her when I replied, "Cool. Let's try out the new CBOs they introduced last week."

We got two sandwiches - one made with crispy chicken, and the other made on an Angus Third Pounder - and cut them in half so we could each try both sandwiches, and added a large fries to share and large coffees.

Out of the two sandwiches, the Crispy Chicken CBO was hands-down our favorite. The cheese and bacon were worthy complements to the chicken patty, and the caramelized onion brought a welcome touch of sweetness to counterbalance the salty bacon (and salty chicken coating.) It reminded us (favorably) of KFC's Double Down, but on a roll.

The Angus Third Pounder CBO was somewhat less successful. For one thing, the patty is far too dry. And because bacon-cheeseburgers have become a fairly standard offering for many a fast-food chain, finding one at McDonald's just isn't that special, even if there is caramelized onions sprinkled atop the patty. (C'mon, there's already an Angus Bacon & Cheese burger on the menu which is almost identical to the CBO.) And though the beef version of the CBO is larger than the chicken, we found it less satisfying because of its ordinariness. When we were done eating, both of wished we'd ordered our own Crispy Chicken CBOs and left the beef ones behind.

A couple of other notes about the ingredients:

• McDonald's bacon is decent - better than the bacon served on sandwiches at most other chains (I'm lookin' at you, Wendy) but it would be even better if they used thick-sliced bacon instead of standard. 
• I can't figure out what is so special about their "white cheddar" cheese since it tastes exactly like the orange cheddar that McDonald's uses on every other burger. 
• The so-called "creamy mustard sauce" is so bland that it might as well be generic Ranch Dressing straight from a supermarket bottle.

My recommendation: Check out the Crispy Chicken CBO (or the Grilled Chicken CBO, for a slightly different take on it) and forget the Angus variety.

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Wild Bill's Bacon Jerky

When Dave and I were both feeling at our worst, I was the one stuck doing some shopping. As I wandered aisles and aisles of food that didn't look appealing and was preoccupied wishing I could go back to bed, I saw the food equivalent of a choir of angels: Wild Bill's Bacon Jerky. I immediately tossed it into the cart, chortling with glee, and went home knowing that I was definitely forgetting something important (milk,) but arriving with something that would certainly make Dave feel better. And besides, bacon jerky must be interesting, because hot damn, who doesn't love jerky?

Well, when I brought it home and we zipped the package open, both Dave and I were disappointed to find nothing more than thick cut, precooked bacon inside. The flavor was okay - a bit on the salty side, if you ask me - but it had this welcome smokiness that brought together the whole flavor profile of the bacon. It wasn't jerky, though. Just plain old precooked bacon, at a 300% markup.

Live and learn, I suppose.

Dave Says:

I was pretty psyched to try this stuff, because you know: BACON.  And also: JERKY. Hot damn. It was quite a disappointment to open up the bag and find thick-cut but otherwise pretty run-of-the-mill precooked bacon, broken up into bite-size (and smaller) chunks.  WTF, six bucks for three ounces of this?  Not cool.  I mean, it was as good as any other precooked bacon I've ever bought, but at least I can get Hormel and Oscar Mayer ready-to-eat pigstrips on sale and in whole slices.

My first thought was that Monogram Meat Snacks, the guys responsible for the Wild Bill's brand, were buying precooked bacon shards that other companies couldn't put into a ready-to-eat bacon package because the slices weren't whole anymore. But no: the USDA Establishment Number printed on the package shows that the bacon was processed by Monogram their own selves.

Anyway, my official rating: decent bacon but definitely not jerky, and not something I'd go out of my way for.

Home-Cured Back Bacon

I had been thinking of making back bacon (also known in the US as "Canadian bacon") for some time. Though the cure and process is just about identical to the "regular" kind, back bacon is made from pork loin rather than belly.  I got an awesome deal on an untrimmed bone-in whole pork loin not too long ago, and after making a top-notch pork roast for dinner in the beginning of the week, I decided to use the center part of the cut for back bacon.  So, using a meat cleaver I took off a section of the whole roast that would yield about five pounds when the ribs were out.

The first step is removing the rib and chine bones from the loin. This is mad easy - using a long, sharp boning knife and the ribs themselves as a guide, cut between the loin and the ribs to remove them.

This shot is also a great way to look at the loin. That big round muscle on the left is the actual loin - the part you'd buy if you were buying a "boneless pork loin roast" (or, if you buy "bone less pork chops" you'd be getting that muscle cut into slices.)  The long muscle at the top of the cut, well sheathed in fat, is the "tail" of the cut and would normally be removed before curing back bacon.  I left it on so I could have a more UK-style bacon.

After the meat is trimmed of the bone, it's time for curing. For the five-pound loin, I used:

¼ cup Kosher salt

2 teaspoons InstaCure #1 ("pink salt")

¼ cup dry glaze packet swiped from a spiral ham (see  below)

3 tablespoons coarsely-ground black pepper

2 teaspoons dried thyme

3 bay leaves, broken up into tiny bits

The spiral ham glaze is made of sugar, dried powdered honey, and spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and a hint of clove. I had bought a spiral ham at ALDI awhile ago and cooked it without the glaze, but when I read the glaze ingredients I thought it would be just the thing for a bacon cure and held on to it.  If I didn't have the glaze packet, I would have used a straight-up ¼ cup of brown sugar.  Mix the ingredients for the rub thoroughly together.

Put the loin into a plastic ziplock bag and massage it all over with every bit of the curing rub. Don't just dump the rub into the bag with the loin, either.  Put the cure in the bag a handful at a time and rub it into the meat as you go along.  When all the cure is used up, seal the plastic bag and set it into your refrigerator for 5 to 7 days.  It will look something like this when you first put it in...

...and it will look like this three days later when you pull it out of the fridge to give it a bit of a massage half-way through.  Notice how the rub has drawn some of the moisture out of the meat.  The cure is well underway.

Five days later, it's time to pull the meat out of the cure and finish it up.   Preheat your oven to 250 F.  Remove the meat from the refrigerator and take it out of the plastic bag.  Rinse it off well under cool running water, gently running your hand along the surface to knock off most of the clinging bits of herbs.  The meat might look a little grey, but that's nothing to worry about.  After rinsing, pat it dry with a paper towel and put it on a rack in a roasting pan.  Back bacon is usually unsmoked, so for this batch I just put it in the oven at 250 F with a temperature probe inserted in the thickest part of the loin muscle to indicate when the internal temperature got to 150 F.  This approximately five-pound chunk of pigmeat took about 3 hours.;  A nice low temperature is essential to cook the pork without melting out all of the treasured fat it contains.

The chunk of bacon is out of the oven and looks awesome.  This point, by the way, is the hardest part about making homemade bacon:  Not eating it before it's been wrapped and chilled.  Tightly wrapping the unsliced bacon and putting it in the refrigerator overnight sets the juices in the meat and makes it much easier to slice.  I cheated a little and cut off the barest sliver of bacon to taste it.  Cue choir of angels - it turned out incredible.  It was all I could do not to slice the whole thing up right then and there and NOM THE HELL OUT OF IT.  But no, I wrapped it up and quietly set it into the fridge to chill.

The next day, take the bacon out of the fridge and use a meat slicer or a sharp carving knife to pare off thin slices from the end.  On the rib side of the meat, the slices will look like wafer-thin pork chops, with a large round loin muscle and some belly fat and meat as a "tail." These slices were taken from the other side - the loin side of the cut - because I wanted some streaks of fat along with the big areas of lean.

 Brown the slices slowly over low heat in a dry skillet - the meat will caramelize and the fatty parts will brown and crisp up as some of the remaining fat is rendered.

My version, using the ALDI spiral ham glaze instead of brown sugar, was totally awesome.  The hints of cinnamon and clove in the glaze gave the bacon a flavor very reminiscent of Chinese char sui pork while still retaining the hamminess typical of back bacon.  It was a huge hit with the family (Huzzah! That gives me an excuse to do it again!)

Farmland Smoked Pork Jowl

"Pork jowl," for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a fatty cut of pig that runs along the side of the head to the neck of the animal.  Most of them are used for making sausage, but they are also available as whole cuts, either "as is" cut from the pork, or cured and smoked like bacon.

Jowl has a similar composition to traditional bacon: it's often sold with the "rind" on, and there are layers of fat and lean within the cut. But there are differences as well: jowls are a smaller cut than pig bellies so they are usually sold as whole cuts; they also tend to be a "bulkier" cut which resembles a roast rather than a flat, "brisket"-like shape.  And unlike bacon, with its familiar streaks of fat and lean, there are often small lines of cartilage running through the jowl. 

Jowl usually has a higher moisture content than traditional bacon, though, so when it's sliced and fried it should be done over low heat to allow some of the water to try out and evaporate.  I like to use a bacon press to weight it down and keep it from curling when I cook it.

Farmland's smoked pork jowl is typical of the product, and like most other Farmland products, it's of pretty high quality.  It can be chunked and cooked with beans, used to flavor greens, or just sliced and fried and eaten on sandwiches or for breakfast like bacon.  It's a little less salty than regular bacon as well without sacrificing any flavor.

Given a choice of the Cumberland Gap jowl bacon I reviewed previously and Farmland, I'd have to choose the Farmland if only for the ease of preparation.

Bacon Prices Continue to Go Insane

It was "sticker shock" at the supermarket this week, where bacon prices have continued to go through the roof.  Look at that:  $6.69 a pound for Oscar Mayer bacon at Stop & Shop, where even the generic no-name crap bacon (the "Guaranteed Value" brand") is now $2.99 a pound - a 50% increase from last year.

I first noticed bacon prices rising in August, but a summertime price bump isn't unusual.  August is when everyone's backyard tomatoes are in their full glory, and bacon prices often tick up a bit then as loads of people buy it to make the archetypal summer sandwich, the BLT.  This year, however, summer prices didn't drift back down.

According to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index, bacon prices have been climbing for seven straight months as of October (the last month for which there is data.)  As of right now, bacon prices are up an average of 33% over last year at this time.

There's a combination of factors at work here.  Remember the H1N1 Swine Flu scare last year?  That caused an overall reduction in hog herds.  Higher feed prices and overall recessionary conditions also helped make raising hogs a money-losing proposition for a lot of farmers.  And because pork bellies (the pigmeat from which we get bacon) is a traded commodity, market pressure from speculators has helped keep bacon prices higher than other pork cuts.

In this August article in the Birmingham [AL] News,  Business Editor Stan Diel said, "The good news for those who like bacon with their eggs in the morning is that it doesn't take nearly as long for farmers to raise new hogs, increasing supply, as it does to raise cattle. And with hogs once again profitable, farmers are raising more of them."  Unfortunately, since then bacon prices have still risen about 7% a month, and my own price surveys in the supermarkets haven't shown any downward trend.

In recent weeks, many of the supermarkets around me have started to run sales on bacon, which is taking some of the sting away.  But when you're starting at a regular price getting close to seven bucks a pound, even the sale prices are expensive compared to last year.

Jones Bacon Soda Holiday Pack

Photo by Jones Soda Co.

It's become a tradition of the Jones Soda Company to introduce special flavors for the holiday season.  Often, these flavors are not only unique but uniquely unpalatable, such as 2005's "Brussels Sprouts" variety (it tasted like Alka-Seltzer dissolved in the pot liquor from boiled cabbage - I could barely take a single swallow without gagging.)

This year, Jones teamed up with J&D's, the maker of Bacon Salt, to produce a supposedly bacon-flavored soda to be packaged in a holiday presentation along with three other J&D products: microwave popcorn, lip balm, and powdered gravy mix, all of them "bacon" flavored.

As soon as I heard of this holiday pack, I hopped onto Jones' website and ordered one.  It arrived yesterday, and the family and I did some sampling.  It should come as no surprise that not a single one of these products really tastes like bacon.  Most of them don't even come close.

This shouldn't have surprised me.  Despite J&D's quite successful marketing campaign,  their flagship product Bacon Salt doesn't taste anything like bacon either.  It simply tastes like smoke-flavor seasoned salt - which it is - with an extremely catchy and well-thought-out name.  Bacon Salt, and other J&D's smoke-flavored products, owe their existence and their sales to the Internet Bacon Meme,.  They never would have become such a success on the basis of their flavor alone.   And speaking of flavors:

Jones Bacon Flavor Soda - Singularly nasty.  It tastes like sweetened, carbonated liquid smoke with absolutely none of the subtle, complex flavor notes found in actual bacon.  Really vomitous. And yet, the horrid and gag-inducing taste is just the beginning.

Much as the way the smell of cigarette smoke clings to hair and clothing, the rank and somewhat stale smoke flavoring of the soda clings to the mouth and throat for hours after only a single swallow.  Not even brushing my teeth and taking a swig of Listerine could completely eliminate it.

The microwave popcorn was similarly unsuccessful. I have to admit that it smelled delicious as it popped - so good, in fact, that I actually held a faint hope that it wouldn't be too bad.  Alas, this was not to be.  The predominant flavor was - can you guess? - smoke, along with a subtle and sour dairy-like component that I suppose from the label ("Cheddar Bacon Pop") was meant to be cheese but came across mostly as reminiscent of baby puke.  To the manufacturer's credit, however, the popping oil was fairly high-quality and didn't coat my mouth like some other brands do.

I don't use lip balm, so I gave it to Lynnafred to try out.  She sniffed at it suspiciously and gave it a try, but was wiping it off in a few minutes.  She compared it to rubbing her lips with Vaseline that had been swirled around in an ashtray.

Last - and least, for all I care - is the "Bacon Gravy."   It's one of those dry-mix packets that you add to water and simmer for a few minutes.  There are a couple "country gravy" mixes like this that aren't too bad, but Bacon Gravy doesn't qualify.  At the risk of sounding like a broken record:  Not bacony.  Smoky.  Salty.  Artificial-tasting.  It's easy to make real bacon gravy from pan drippings if that's what you want.  When you're done frying bacon, pour off all but a tablespoon or so of the fat.  Blend in a couple of tablespoons of flour with the fat and drippings in the pan over low heat, and let it cook for a few minutes to eliminate the "raw flour" taste.  Then add a cup of milk, turn up the heat to medium and stir while the gravy thickens.  Taste and add seasonings to your liking, and you have real bacon gravy - that will taste like real bacon and not some shitty mix - in only a couple of minutes longer than the mix will take.

Let's just face some facts here, okay?  Bacon - real honest pigmeat bacon - is the product of an amazing process by which pork, curing, and smoke combine to create something far more than the sum of its parts.  The hunger for cured and smoked pork almost seems hardwired into our genetic makeup - bacon is such a sought-after flavor that people whose most deeply-held beliefs forbid them from eating it drive them to create substitutions and imitations of it.  It's completely understandable to me why someone would try to place that flavor into other products in an attempt to spread the joy.

The problem is this:  Every one of the many, many "bacon-flavored" products I've tasted relies on one specific characteristic of bacon for it's primary flavor component:  Smoke.  And that's a big problem, because  bacon doesn't taste like smoke alone.  Bacon has a complex flavor profile of which smoke is simply one component.  There's salt, and various sugars, and rich meaty pork, and other almost subliminal notes  which come from aromatics used in the brine or which result from curing, like lactose.  There simply is no way - short of adding bacon itself to a dish - that anyone is going to get a true and decent bacon "flavor" from salt, smoke, maltodextrin, and autolyzed yeast extract.

As of right now, I'm done with the fake bacon crap.  I'm not buying any more of it, and I'm not reviewing any more of it either unless a manufacturer or public relations firm spends their own coin to treat me to a sample.  And they've got to make a product that's a hell of a lot better than the usual junk if they expect a thumbs-up from me.

Lynnafred's Who Let YOU Cook?! Volume Two

So, what do you get when you have nothing appealing in your fridge, a handful of eggs, and some leftover cheese and bacon from cheeseburgers the night before? If you answered "Who Let You Cook?" you were right!

With the aforementioned eggs, cheese, and bacon, as well as about a half teaspoon of milk, I made myself a bacon and cheese omelette. For most people, this wouldn't be really "Who Let You Cook" worthy, but it definitely is for me. For as long as I've been making simple things in the kitchen, I've never once successfully made either a fried egg or an omelet. My fried eggs always come out busted and vastly overcooked; my omelets come out either vastly undercooked and crumbled to bits, or vastly overcooked and crumbled to bits. Either way, it's never been successful.

How did I make it?:  So after preparing my egg and milk mixture (I used no salt, figuring that the bacon and cheese would have more than enough) or pepper (because I forgot about it), I started to heat up a small amount of butter in a pan over low heat. When it was just starting to bubble at the edges, I poured in my eggs and let it start to set. When the bottom layer was fully cooked, I used a spatula to push some of it over and let the top layer of uncooked egg take its place. Then I did the same thing on the opposite side. When there was nothing but a thin layer of sticky egg inside, I dumped in my roughly cut bacon and cheese mixture, carefully folded it over, and let it finish cooking, flipping it once. It never split apart on me. I added a little bit of extra cheese on top before I ate it, because I love cheese.

So how was it?: Very good, actually. I've always enjoyed the flavors of bacon, egg, and cheese together, so this was definitely something I'd try making again. It needed a bit of pepper, but that was easily added afterwards, so it was nothing that was a meal destroyer. I'll do this again, for sure, but maybe I'll experiment with different cheeses next time.

Vintage Sunday: Meat for War

Click the picture to load the full-size scan.

I found this awesome WW2-era advertisement from the American Meat Institute on the web and thought it was worth sharing.  Enjoy.

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Vintage Sunday: A Handful of Old Bacon Recipes

Thanks to the Internet Bacon Meme, people seem to think that the intense interest in bacon is a recent phenomenon.  The variety of old recipes featuring bacon may surprise you.

From an original photo by carla fealy choate
Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Take, for example Chicken Fried Bacon.  The Wikipedia article about it says it was introduced in Texas in the early 1990's, but an incredibly similar recipe appeared in the Sarasota [FL] Herald nearly 60 years earlier, on 29 December 1937:

Breaded Luncheon Bacon

Have a well beaten egg in one plate and finely crushed cracker crumbs in anohter. Have bacon sliced thin and cut the strips in two for easier handling. Dip each slice of bacon first in the egg, then in the cracker crumbs and brown in hot fat in a skillet. Watch and turn carefully as it burns easily.

A recipe for Bacon Corn Bread appeared in that issue as well.  It looks pretty good, but personally I think it could use a bit more bacon:

Bacon Corn Bread

From the Sarasota [FL] Herald, 29 December 1937

1 cup corn meal
1 cup white flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 egg, well beaten
1 cup sweet milk
¼ cup diced bacon

Sift flour, measure and sift with baking powder and salt. Add corn meal. Combine egg, milk and bacon which has been crisped. Add dry ingredients. Fill well-oiled muffin tins 2/3 full. Bake in hot oven (450 F) 15 minutes.

Here's another delicious bacon recipe, this one from the Miami News, 8 January 1937:

Bacon and Oyster Sandwich

Place one raw oyster and a strip of partially broiled bacon on each lightly toasted round of bread and toast the sandwich under the broiler flame unitl lightly browned. Serve while hot with mayonnaise.

This crappy out-of-focus picture
was the best I could do with the
lousy camera in my cell phone.

This old classic, Anchovy Bacon Rolls, is from my grandmother's favorite cookbook, the Woman's Home Companion Cookbook, 1941 edition:

Anchovy Bacon Rolls

Lay one or two anchovy fillets along each slice of bacon; roll tightly jelly-roll fashion and fasten with a toothpick. Broil until bacon is crisp and browned. Remove toothpick and insert a fresh one. Serve hot.

Anchovy bacon rolls are really delicious, but between the fishies and the cured pigmeat, they're pretty salty.

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Oscar Mayer Super Thick Cut Applewood Smoked Bacon

Marianne at The Royal Bacon Society recently gave away 10 coupons each good for a free pound of Oscar Mayer's new Super Thick Cut Applewood Smoked Bacon, and I was one of the lucky recipients.

If you remember, back in July I mocked Oscar Mayer for their "Hearty Thick Cut" bacon, which was not at all thick cut...but was extra wide.  I thought that was a sneaky trick, but Marianne's review of the new stuff was fairly glowing and, you know, the price was right.

Well, I'm glad I gave them another chance.  The new Super Thick Cut bacon is made of Win and Joy.  The slices are hugely thick - like, ham-thick - and there are only nine slices per pound.  What's more: there are no huge, meatless expanses of fat in these rashers, but rather a very nice balance of lean and fat, with a distribution pattern so perfect that one might call it "textbook bacon."  Consequently, they cooked evenly with no wrinkling or curling.  I always cook very thick bacon over moderately low heat and under a heavy cast-iron bacon press to make sure that the slices brown evenly and aren't tempted to curl up as the fat renders out, but the Super Thick Cut bacon didn't need the bacon press, it stayed flat all by itself.  That's always a good sign, because it means that the cure wasn't too wet and that not a lot of water was retained after the pork came out of the cure.

The final result is delicious.  Semi crisp and not brittle,  just the right amount of salt, and topped off with real applewood smoke (no "added flavoring.")  This stuff is fantastic for breakfast, but would be every bit as awsome wrapped around a thick cut of pork tenderloin, coarsely chopped into a tossed green salad, or laid down heavily on top of burgers.  Oscar Mayer has hit one out of the park with this bacon.
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Cumberland Gap Hickory Smoked Sliced Pork Jowl Bacon

On January 19th, over at The Ridiculous Food Society of Upstate New York, Mr. Dave (no relation) reviewed Cumberland Gap Jowl Bacon. Click here for a link to that post.

It's been a while since I had jowl bacon, so I immediately headed over to my local Price Chopper to see if it was available, and it was! So I bought a package, and last weekend the family and I tucked into some for breakfast.

Now if you've ever seen a smoked jowl before, you'll know that it is very much crescent-shaped: the ends are narrow - pointy, even - and the central part is broad. From a commercial packers' point of view, it must be a nightmare, because it would be really hard to get a product like that into neat, uniform slices that are easy to package.

Cumberland Gap seems to have come up with sort of a solution to that problem, though. They apparently take the jowls and compress them into a cylindrical shape, then split them down the center and cut them into neatly uniform semicircular slices. The irregular shape of a natural jowl doesn't lend itself easily to this kind of shaping, though, and there are little pockets of gelatine filling in the gaps in the slices.

What this all adds up to is a variety of bacon with more of a moisture content than usual, and which tends to get a little tatty-looking as it cooks. Thick slices and wet cures mean that cooking over a lower heat is the best method here, but the irregular way the jowl is jumbled together in the slices cause them to take on a wicked curl as they start to fry. Accordingly, I kept the fire down to low and used my cast-iron bacon press to hold the slices down in the pan. They cooked up every bit as ugly as I expected - unevenly shaped, with bits falling off here and there. But all was not lost! The slices also cooked up evenly and, with the help of the bacon press, nicely within that range of bacon perfection where the slices are crispy but not brittle and uniformly golden brown.

At right, you can see what I mean by "tatty-looking" bits of pork. The compressed bits just simply "let go" of each other and sizzled up into more-or-less random shapes that had nothing to do with either the natural shape of the jowl or the semicircular shape that was imposed upon them.

But with bacon, it doesn't matter so much what the stuff looks like; the important part is how it tastes. And Cumberland Gap jowl bacon has a very good flavor, indeed.

It's not too salty, yet not bland. The smoke flavor is noticeable and delicious, and as Mr. Dave mentioned, it has a richer and more "porky" flavor than standard bacon. Parts of the jowl are a bit cartilaginous, so you also get bits of chewy, tooth-resistant bacony goodness that adds to the textural interest.

Overall, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Cumberland Gap's jowl bacon to anyone. It really does make a nice change from the standard rashers of bacon we find everywhere. I just can't help but wish that they'd leave the stuff in its natural shape instead of trying to impose a fragile uniformity upon it that just falls apart upon cooking.

Link:

Cumberland Gap Provision Company - Learn about the company and about their many other pork products.

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Slab Bacon That Can Not Be Unseen

Sometimes when you buy slab bacon the piece you get is cut from the teat section of the belly. Yes. Delicious cured and smoked pig nipple:


Slab bacon has to be sliced before frying. If you do it just right, you can cross-section the nipple:


Don't be squeamish; once the bacon is cooked, you can't tell the difference:

So feel free to serve fried pig nipples to your guests. They'll never know the difference, though they might wonder why you're snickering while they NOM NOM the bacon.

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Wilson's Certified Campsite Bacon Bar

Pictured above: a genuine Wilson's Certified Campsite Bacon Bar. Compact food for the cutting-edge camper in the 60's and 70's, the Bacon Bar is 100% pre-fried bacon, compressed into a block measuring about 2 x 3 x 1 inches. This is an actual product, and the example shown above really does contain a block of bacon, still vacuum-sealed in its heavy foil-like pouch (I've thought about opening it up and perhaps giving it a taste - who wouldn't want to try 35-year-old bacon after all?) but decided that since I only have one, I'd keep it intact.

Amazingly, this small 3-ounce bar started off as a full pound of bacon and was considered innovative enough to be mentioned in a Sports Illustrated article in 1963, soon after it had been introduced.

According to this advertisement in the April 1976 issue of Backpacker magazine, the Bacon Bar retailed for $2.45.

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International Bacon Day 2009

International Bacon Day is recognized by pig belly enthusiasts on the Saturday before Labor Day (which, considering Labor Day is an American holiday, makes me wonder just how "international" it is, but whatever.) In 2009, this day is September 5.

Doing a quick Google search on International Bacon Day will bring up page upon page of links. There's an official website for the "holiday" as well as tons of info related to it (parties, specialty items, T-shirts, and so on.)

You may not decide to party, fly a bacon flag, or paint your dog with pink and off-white stripes to resemble a slice of bacon in celebration of the day. I know that I'm not. But you might want to celebrate in a very personal and meaningful way: by making your own homemade bacon.

The process that transforms a fatty chunk of pigmeat into delicious bacon is indeed magical, but it's not that hard to do. If you've ever made an apple pie or cooked dinner for your family from a recipe, you can probably do it. The thing is, it takes some time. If you start today - locating and buying the necessary ingredients, including pork belly - and get your bacon curing within the next day or two, you can celebrate International Bacon Day in real style, by smoking your own home-cured bacon on Saturday morning, then enjoying it that very afternoon with family and friends in observance of the holiday.

So: Go forth and gather your supplies. Make some bacon. And on September 5, become a Titan Among Men as you share your homemade bacon with your friends, for they will taste it and worship you and raise mighty statues in your honor and sing your name in songs.

Here's my tutorial and recipes for making bacon at home.

Want to be more adventurous? Here's a tutorial about Whiskey-Cured Bacon.

Here's the official International Bacon Day website.

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Oscar Mayer No-Lean Bacon

Yeah, I know it's bacon and there's supposed to be fat, but I don't remember a "premium" brand like Oscar Mayer having quite this much.

When Thick Sliced Ain't Thick Sliced

It's been hot and humid the past week, and native tomatoes are ripening on the vine. Naturally, it's time for BLTs! Oscar Mayer bacon is on sale this week at the local Stop & Shop, and it's a decent deal at $3.50 a pound. So I bought a couple packages of Hearty Thick Cut Oscar Mayer bacon - even though it didn't look all that much thicker than the regular stuff.

Turns out it really isn't any thicker than the regular stuff. It's a lot wider, though. Seriously. The strips are wide enough that only three or four will fit side-by-side in my frypan. But they're not one bit thicker than regular ol' Oscar Mayer bacon.

So they got me on a technicality. The package doesn't actually say "thick sliced." No. It's "thick cut." I guess that means that the pork belly the bacon is made from was itself cut thicker than usual, therefore yielding wider strips. Sneaky bastards. That's what I get for not paying full attention.

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Otakon 2009

I'm in Baltimore this weekend attending Otakon, the huge anime/manga/video game conference that attracts tens of thousands of cosplayers, fans, and otaku to Charm City every year around this time. Those guys in the picture below are dressed up as characters from the popular video game Team Fortress 2.

Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of food to write about at Otakon, unless you count crappy reheated chicken tenders for $9.00 a serving, or a 10-ounce bottle of Japanese Ramune soda pop for three bucks. So let's step outside the Baltimore Convention Center - right across the street, actually - to The Nest on Pratt Street for lunch, where we can get an ice-cold beer and a delicious sandwich and watch the world walk by our shady outdoor table.

Check out this BLT. They call it a "Brother Pudge" for good reason. Crispy lettuce, delicious locally-grown tomatoes, and about half a pound of perfectly cooked crispy bacon.

Yeah. Otakon is fun, but half a pound of bacon in a BLT? That's reason enough to come to Baltimore.

Branding Iron Hardwood Smoked Bacon

There are few products which can be as much of a crap shoot as bargain-price bacon. Sometimes, it will be a jumble of seemingly random slices, piled into the cryovac. Other times, it might be some of the best bacon you've ever tasted. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

Branding Iron Hardwood Smoked Bacon is a great example. Made by John Morrell & Company as an "economy brand," it's available at Price Chopper, where I picked some up for $1.99 not too long ago. The view of the slices through the window looked pretty good, and it was a full 1-pound package, so there was no doubt of it being a good deal.

What a surprise when I opened the package, though! The slices were the full length of the cryovac - and each slice was almost three inches wide. Additionally, each of these hyperwide slices were over a quarter of an inch thick! All told, there were seven slices of bacon to this pound. Seven massive slices.

Really thick bacon is hard to cook properly - it wants to curl as fat gets tried out of the side in contact with the pan, and if you try to cook it too quickly it can end up flabby, burned, or unevenly done. The best way to do it is to take your time, set the fire on low, and use a bacon press to keep the strips flat in the pan as they cook. My bacon press is like the one at right: big and round, it covers the whole bottom of a 12-inch frying pan.

Only three strips of the Branding Iron bacon would fit in the pan at once, so it took some time to get breakfast ready that day. The bacon stayed under the press and I checked it frequently for doneness as it sizzled. Thanks to the low heat and the press, each strip came out very nicely: Crisp with the fat properly rendered, but not overcooked to brittleness.

Although we had a good laugh at the unusual way the bacon had been sliced, I would buy it again. Branding Iron bacon is nicely flavored; not too salty with a mild and enjoyable smokiness.

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