In this installment
Bacon bits
About Nueske’s
What is bacon, anyway?
Bacon Glossary
Wilted Salad Recipe
Bacon bits
Maker: Tanya Nueske in Wittenberg, Wisconsin
Cure: Wet-cured for twenty-four hours in a brine mixture with sugar and spices.
Smoke: Applewood for 24 hours
Taste: Our most popular bacon. Meaty, pleasantly sweet and smoky.
About Nueske’s
“The beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of rashers.” R.W. Apple, New York Times
Tanya Nueske, granddaughter of the founder of Nueske’s Smokehouse, is about as passionate about her product as you’re going to get. Tanya’s high energy comes across as what it is: the sincere love of, and passion for, her product. “What we do is a very old tradition. My grandfather started up selling the bacon in 1933. He started out smoking over applewood. And he had a way of doing it and style that came from his grandparents.”
Even though she’s been around it her entire life, Tanya still loves to eat her family’s bacon. And eat it often. “I eat bacon so much. I eat it plain all the time. We used to do some toasted buns with olives, sautéed onions, bacon and cheese and sour cream. You put ‘em under the broiler—it’s so good. We also take our hot dogs and we split them down the middle and add cheddar cheese and a pickle and wrap the whole thing in bacon and run it under the broiler. Basically we use bacon with everything!”
Nueske’s works with high quality hogs.
The hogs are crossbred with Pietrain pigs because of the latter’s excellent lean to fat ratio. The Pietrain is an old breed, with shortish legs and white with black spots. It’s named for the Belgian village in which it was apparently bred centuries ago. Tanya says, “We work with a private supplier who raises their own hogs on family farms. They transport, slaughter, process and ship via their own trucks. Also, they grow their own feed and use sustainable practices in farming while humanely raising the animals. What the hogs are fed plays a huge part in flavor and quality. We do a feed that’s mostly a wheat and corn mixture. We’ve been working with our suppliers for well over twenty-five years, and we still hand trim everything.”
What’s really important is that Nueske’s uses whole applewood logs.
The Nueske’s cure their fresh slabs of bacon for at least twenty-four hours, hang them to dry for a day or so and then smoke them for at least a day. “When you smoke slowly over genuine applewood embers for a full 24 hours, the sweet smoke really has a chance to permeate each cut of meat and impart our signature flavor,” Tanya says. While the timing sounds easy to replicate, the smoking is really a craft. “We design our smokehouses ourselves and have ‘em built for us,” she explains. She laughs and then adds, “The smokehouses are like children. The smokemaster will tell you that each smokehouse is different.” Tanya goes on, “‘Applewood smoke’ can mean almost anything these days: apple juice, apple smoke flavoring. But we only use real logs.”
Nueske’s is our top selling bacon.
Without question, Nueske’s bacon has proven to be one of the most popular foods we’ve got for sale anywhere at Zingerman’s. We sell lots of it for folks to take home to cook in their own kitchens. We use it extensively in our restaurants. If you visit you can try it on any number of sandwiches at Zingerman’s Deli, where we’ve been cooking with it for almost thirty years. It’s in the greens at Zingerman’s Road- house. It’s in the Bacon Peppered Farm Bread or Bacon Scones from Zingerman’s Bakehouse.
For me, it’s the Platonic ideal of bacon. It is the one against which I measure all other bacons. Although you might use it on a BLT or in some other dish, I urge you to try it as is, cooked till just crispy, warm from the skillet. If it’s your first bite of Nueske’s, get ready. Your bacon life will never be the same.
What is bacon, anyway?
I thought this was a pretty simple question. But bacon, like most things in life, turned out to be more complicated than I’d originally anticipated.
Up until the latter part of the sixteenth century, bacon (or “bacoun”) was a Middle English word that people used to refer to pork of any sort. The term is likely taken from the French backo, Common Ger- manic bakkon and Old Teutonic backe, all of which refer to the “back,” the part of the pig typically used for bacon-making in Europe.
It’s interesting and odd that bacon as we know it over here in the U.S. comes not from the back but from the belly and side of the pig. That seems to be an anatomical disconnect until you realize that in Europe the term “bacon” means something entirely different than it does over here.
William Tullberg, from the British mustard and condiment company Wiltshire Tracklements, explains that “an Englishman thinks of bacon in terms of a whole cured Wiltshire side, gammon, back, streak and shoulder. I’ve seen many a mystified Englishman unable to understand that bacon in America means cured belly pork, complaining bitterly that his breakfast bacon and eggs were not right, because he expected sliced back bacon!”
What about mass market bacon?
Like most traditional foods there really isn’t all that much to mess with when it comes to bacon. Either you do it right or you make the sort of stuff that accounts for ninety-nine percent of what’s sold in supermarkets. That said, I guess it shouldn’t come as a shock that there are such huge quality differ- ences between the bacons we can buy. While the word bacon appears boldly on all of them, there are pretty drastic differences from one to the next.
While the industrial product dominates the cooler cases of American supermarkets, it’s pretty much everything we bacon fanatics don’t want in bacon. It’s mass-produced, confinement pork that’s pumped with lots of water to keep the per pound cost down. Cook it up, and it shrinks by a factor of about fifty percent when it hits a hot pan. (When you get that spatter and sizzle that so many folks have come to accept as the norm of bacon cooking, it’s actually an auditory indicator that there’s way too much water in the meat.)
Mass market bacon is almost always loaded up with salt. That’s primarily to mask the lack of flavor in otherwise almost tasteless meat. A Spanish chef once told me, “When you eat the bad anchovies, afterwards you can drink a fountain.” It’s the same story when it comes to mass market bacon. If I eat a BLT in a low-end diner, hours later I’m so thirsty I can barely cope. Finally, bad bacon adds the lugubrious flavor of liquid smoke to the meat, trying to make up for lost time and lost wood that it would have gotten if it’d actually entered a real smokehouse.
Happily, not all bacon is made for the mass market. There are great tasting, full flavored traditional offerings out there, like the very package you just received.
A Brief Bacon Glossary
Bacon: Over here in the U.S., cured and usually, though not always, smoked pork belly.
British Bacon: Today, this generally refers to the back and not the belly, cured in a brine solution but not smoked.
Canadian Peameal Bacon: Pork loin cured in a wet brine solution and then rolled in cornmeal. The real thing is sold raw and never smoked.
Fatback: The strip of fat from the top of the hog’s back, above the loin. Used extensively in old-style American cooking, it usually has no meat on it whatsoever.
Guanciale: Italian-style pork jowl, dry cured and unsmoked.
Irish Bacon: Same as British bacon but often prepared by boiling.
Lardo: Italian-style pork back fat, dry-cured in slabs for months. Sliced and eaten raw. Not smoked.
Pancetta: Dry cured but unsmoked Italian-style bacon made from pork belly.
Rashers: Slices of bacon, to a Brit.
Streaky Bacon: What British people ask for when they want American-style belly bacon.
Wilted Salad Recipe
A great all-American dish dating back to the Colonial era, wilted salad uses bacon fat as the basis for the dressing. Because the fat will solidify once it cools, the dressing must be served warm.
6 oz mixed greens, washed and dried
6 oz sliced bacon (about 3-4 slices)
2 scallions (greens and whites), thinly sliced
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1⁄2 teaspoon sugar
Coarse sea salt to taste
2 oz cheddar cheese, diced (optional)
1⁄4 c walnuts or hickory nuts, lightly toasted and chopped (optional)
Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to taste
Place the greens in a large, heat-proof serving bowl.
Fry the bacon in a heavy-bottomed skillet over medium heat until crisp. Remove from the skillet, drain and chop. Keep about 4 tablespoons of fat in the skillet.
Add the sliced scallions to the pan, and cook for a minute. Pour in the cider vinegar, sugar and a pinch of salt. Stir well and boil lightly for a minute.
If you’re using cheese or toasted nuts, distribute them over the greens. Pour the hot dressing over the top, toss well and sprinkle with the bits of cooked bacon and plenty of fresh pepper. Serve warm.
Serves 2 as a main course or 4 as a side dish.