Mmm, sweet, salty meat candy. Is there any thing better than a lazy Saturday morning with bacon and eggs for breakfast? Since we’re here, lets talk about bacon.
1. Bacon and the Internet
You can tape it to your cat and I”m convinced because of that the internet loves bacon. Because the internet loves bacon you can find more bacon products than you can shake a stick at. Bacon salt, bacon mayonnaise, bacon candy, Diet Coke with Bacon*. It goes on and on. This however is not the purpose of this post. Most of these products aren’t paleo and therefore only for our entertainment, not for our consumption.
*not an actual product. Good photoshop work though.
2. How Bacon is Made
In real life bacon come from pigs, specifically from the pork belly.
The pork belly is cured with salt (either brined, injected or dry cured). At this point it is called fresh or green bacon. Generally, however, it is smoked (liquid or otherwise) and dried to become what Americans know as bacon. We’re not going to go into that Canadian bacon stuff.
3. How to Cook Bacon
Once we get the bacon there are several ways to prepare it. Your basic choices are microwave, stovetop and oven.
Microwaved bacon is not to be spoken of. You do what you have to, but we will not speak further of it here.
I, and I think most people, learned that bacon was cooked on the stovetop in a cast iron skillet, like our chuckwagon forefathers. This method has many flaws. It limits your bacon count to the number of slices you can fit in the skillet, causes splatter, dreaded curling, and fills your house with smoke and tiny particles of bacon grease that coat everything and cause people to look at you funny when they walk past you on the street later in the day. On the positive side, you can cook your eggs in the same skillet.
The best way to cook bacon is in the oven. Set the oven at 350 arrange the slices on a cookie sheet and let them cook to desired doneness (somewhere between 10-20 minutes). The slices won’t curl and you can cook the bacon crispier without burning, rendering more fat out of it. In fact, it is extremely hard to actually burn bacon in the oven. If you want to make eggs too, put the bacon slices in your cast iron skillet and put that in the oven. After the bacon’s done, slap that skillet on the stovetop and crack your eggs in.
4. Health concerns
Loren Cordain puts bacon in the foods-to-avoid category, and it’s a reasonable suggestion. Factory bacon is chock full of sodium nitrate, sodium phosphate and sodium erythobrate,which may or may not cause cancer and hypertension. More importantly, it’s hard to find a bacon in a grocery store that does not have sugar in it.
Trichinosis: USDA certified bacon is treated for the trichinosis worm, so we’re safe there. Also, there are about a dozen cases of trichinosis from pork a year in the US and you are statistically more likely to get it from eating bear than pork. Even if you’re eating bacon raw it isn’t a major concern.
5. Other Uses
There are many ways to use bacon besides just straight up next to the eggs. The fat and salt in it make it great for adding flavor to other foods that need it, like other meats ( draping a pork roast, wrapping shrimp), or veggies. The fat can be used for wilting greens (spinach, turnip,collard, etc.) or for frying up or roasting veggies or meats or eggs.
We’ve barely touched the surface of bacon, it’s a big world of pork belly meats out there.
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