All About Bacon
This week’s Butcher Blog celebrates that king of breakfast meats, the mighty strip of bacon!
For this week’s video, I bought six different types of bacon at Walmart, cooked them up, and I give my rating for the best tasting brand. You can take a look at the video here.
Now, what more is there to say about bacon? So much more! Here’s a sampling of some bacon facts and lore I found courtesy of the National Pork Board.
You know that old saying about a husband “bringing home the bacon”? Know where that’s from? Today a wife may be as likely to bring home the bacon as the husband, but not so in 12th century England. In the days of yore, it was the husband who could bring home the bacon from the town church in Dunmow. For any husband who could promise before the church and God that he and his wife had not quarreled for a year and a day, the prize was a side of bacon! The victorious non-confrontational husband would then, as you might guess, bring home the bacon.
Yes, England was eating bacon in the 12th century, but bacon’s history goes back much further. Pork was being salted and preserved in China as early as 1,500 BC. The ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed their pork as well. Fast forward considerably to the United States and that magical year in the history of bacon, 1924. In that year, our friend Oscar Mayer patented the very first package of sliced bacon. American cuisine has not been the same since!
Now it wouldn’t be a Butcher Blog post without talking about the cut of meat. Bacon comes from the pork belly. How much of the good stuff does that mean? A 275-pound pig yields about 15 pounds of bacon. The belly meat is cured, most often with a salt and water brine solution. That cured goodness is then sliced into strips of bacon. To give you an idea of the thickness options, thin sliced bacon has about 35 strips per pound, regular sliced has 16-20 slices, and thick cut yields about 12-16 slices.
Last fact. How much bacon does America consume? Well, as of 2014 (the most recent data I found), the answer… a whopping 1.1 billion bacon servings a year! Centuries later, we’re still bringing home the bacon.
—Brad