It's BACON!

By Betty Cichy

phillyBurbs.com

October 22, 2003 1:08 PM

link to article

Bacon is almost every nutritional no-no you can think of combined in one thin, shrink-wrapped package. A slab of fat barely streaked with meat, it’s bathed in salt, sugar and smoke with a dash of chemicals thrown in.

And we can’t get enough of it.

“Bacon is just getting bigger and bigger,” says Dwight Ely, owner of Ely Pork Products in Upper Makefield. The bacon cured and smoked on his farm has become so popular that Ely now keeps a stack of packages in the meat case, rather than slicing it to order the way he used to.


Jeff Bringhurst has also noticed a growing demand for bacon at Bringhurst Meats, his family’s butcher shop in Berlin, N.J. “I think people are tired of eating healthy, and they’re ready to go back to good flavors,” he says.

Yet for those on the Atkins diet and other low-carb regimens, bacon actually is a health food, high in protein and low in carbohydrates. Instead of the toast or bagel they used to eat, many of them are again enjoying bacon and eggs with their morning coffee.

And nothing beats a little bacon for boosting the flavor of everyday dishes, from chicken and salads to baked potatoes and hamburgers. “A lot of your fast foods are throwing two strips of bacon on a sandwich,” observes Bob Moyer, who makes and smokes his own bacon at Blooming Glen Pork and Catering, north of Doylestown.

All these reasons have contributed to the recent increase in bacon sales, which rose nearly 5 percent last year, according to the National Provisioner, a trade journal specializing in the meat and prepared foods industries. But while the large meat processors that supply restaurants and supermarkets have been the major beneficiary, it’s the small producers who make so-called “artisan bacon” that have been generating excitement among food lovers.

In California, a mail-order company called the Grateful Palate (http://www.gratefulpalate.com) has enrolled a thousand members in its Bacon of the Month Club, which for $120 plus the cost of two-day shipping will deliver to your door 12 different pounds of bacon from small smokehouses across the United States.

“All the bacon is hand-cured, hand-smoked and highly unique,” explains Melanie Burge, executive assistant to Dan Philips, the founder of Grateful Palate. One subscriber wrote them that when a new box of bacon arrives every month, her husband is so happy he dances around the box.

“Bacon is whimsy. It’s delicious. People go nuts,” says Burge.

But you don’t have to wait for the mail to enjoy the flavor of handmade, small-batch bacon. A short drive in the country will bring you to local producers like Ely, Bringhurst, Moyer and Ernest K. Illg, whose family has been selling homemade bacon, sausages and other meats at their Chalfont store for more than 40 years.

The way they make their bacon — dry curing it with salt and sugar, then hardwood smoking it — has been around much longer than that, however. “We do it the old-fashioned way, the way it was done back in the Revolutionary days,” Illg says.

There are some differences, of course — Illg’s uses hardwood sawdust instead of logs, and everything is done under strict federal inspection. But making bacon is still a time-consuming process, taking about two weeks in all. Most of that is devoted to the cure, which gives the bacon a robust flavor, Illg says.

Compare that to mass-produced bacon, which is often wet and flabby, thanks to the mix of water, salt and sugar that’s injected into the slab before its brief trip through the smokehouse. (If it’s smoked at all — some brands just have smoke flavoring added.)

You’re paying for that extra water when you buy commercial bacon, which has recently soared to more than $5 a pound. Many locally made bacons cost at least a dollar less, and you get more of it, since the bacon actually loses moisture during the smoking process.

“The consumer is going to get quite a few strips more per pound than in commercial bacon,” Bob Moyer says. That, and personal service, too.

“If they want it sliced thick or sliced thin, we just put it in the slicer and give them what they want,” Moyer says.

Time to invest in those pork bellies!

I love bacon--wish there was more of it around without the nitrates and nitrites. The nitrate-free stuff is pretty darn expensive and sometimes has more sugar.