Cookbook:Bacon

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

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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

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

Belly

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

• English gammon

Back

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

• (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