Cookbook | Recipes | Ingredients | Basic foodstuffs | Meat and poultry


Fried American bacon.

Bacon is made by curing and cold smoking or drying the sides, back, or belly of pork. Because it is cured, bacon tends to keep for a very long time.

Varieties Edit

There are several kinds of bacon, differentiated mainly by the cut of pork from which they are made:

Belly Edit

Bacon made from the back of the belly is fattier than bacon made from the front of a belly.

  • American bacon: made by curing the pork belly in a brine made of sugar, salt, pepper and other assorted spices for at least three days, and then cold smoking 2 it.
  • English streaky bacon
  • Italian bacon (pancetta): made by removing the skin and seasoning the meat with salt, pepper and other spices such as juniper berries, muscot nuts, cloves and cinnamon1. It is cured for two weeks and then rolled up and packed into a skin much like salami. Like many sausages high in fat, pancetta is hard to cut.

Pork butt Edit

  • English gammon

Back Edit

Bacons made from the back of a hog are much leaner, and do not taste the same as bacons made from the pork belly. They include:

  • Canadian bacon
  • English back bacon
  • Irish bacon

References Edit

  • (1): The Essential Pasta Cookbook, Murdoch Books, 1996 ISBN 3-8290-1919-X
  • {2): Alton Brown, Season 5 "Scrap Iron Chef" Episode of Good Eats, 2001

External links Edit