In this installment
Bacon bits
About Ferry Farms
Bacon debates: crispy v. chewy
Bacon bits
Makers: Scott & Ali Ferry in Litchfield, Michigan.
Cure: Dry Cured for about a week in salt and spices
Smoke: Cold Smoked over hickory for nearly 24 hours
Taste: Rich, meaty, porky, just a little sweet.
About Ferry Farms
And now for what might be the first Michigan bacon we’ve sold in our history of selling of bacon! Bacon has gone from Sunday morning staple to haute cuisine in a couple of decades and its popularity continues to grow. Yet this is the first bacon we’ve found from Michigan that we’ve wanted to bring to our shelves and share with you. That’s saying something.
Litchfield is in the bottom center of the state, smack dab in the middle of beautiful farm country…the type of place where there’s only two lane roads and they stretch out for miles. It comes to us from Scott and Ali Ferry, fourth generation family farmers who mostly raises dairy and meat cows, as well as growing corn, soy beans and alfalfa on their 1500 acre farm. The crops they grow they feed to their livestock and they supply neighboring farms as well. In this case, the pigs are raised on a neighbors farm, processed locally and then cured, smoked, sliced and packaged nearby.
The Ferrys believe in being stewards of the environment and they land they till. The land has been in the family since 1906, and Scott & Ali think they can leave it even better than they found it. Working with state entities like MAEAP, they’re constantly trying to reduce their energy and water consumption while giving their 300 head of cattle the best lives possible. They’ve channeled that responsibility into the partnerships they enjoy with their neighboring farms and friends.
The Berkshire breed pigs they use for the bacon enjoy a life outdoors (if they want) and are never fed antibiotics or hormones like they do in the larger scale, more industrial operations. The result is a bacon without pretension. A slice that’s crisp and smoky and slightly sweet and a whole bunch porky.
Bacon debates: crispy v. chewy
Although most every bacon eater has his or her opinion on this issue, I thought I’d go to the source and see what some of the folks who make good bacon have to say on the subject. I expected to get some pretty sharp differences, but what I found is that most, if not all of the bacon makers like their bacon on the softer side.
What the Bacon Makers Say
Tanya Nueske: “Definitely softer…We always try to encourage bacon that has some bend.”
Sam Edwards: “My recommendation is to slice it really thin and fry it up. I don’t like mine so crispy. I like it a little flappy because if you cook it too long it gets dried out in my opinion. I like it fried and cooled down with a little of a flop to it.”
At Broadbent’s The Drennans are a mixed bacon marriage: “Ronny prefers his bacon almost limp, not real crispy,” Beth told me, “but I prefer mine crispy. I mostly microwave my bacon. I cook it on a round microwave tray for about four minutes. Usually the bacon on the outside of the tray is crispy and the middle is not quite as done. This is usually perfect for the two of us. I will fry bacon in a skillet when I’m wanting drippings for other cooking purposes. The drippings aren’t nearly as good from the microwave bacon.”
Soft Makes Sense
In thinking more about this over the months, it’s dawned on me that the fact that all these great bacon makers are so biased toward eating bacon in its softer state makes perfect sense. I have a feeling that people like me, who are inclined to eating it crispier and more well done arrived at that habit by cooking commercial bacon. Since the flavor of the actual pork in those products is relatively low, the crispness and slight charring overrides the reality there’s actually very little flavor to be had. It’s akin to the idea of drinking not very good beer at very cold temperatures. Feels refreshing but it’s more about the mouthfeel and the cooling effect on a hot day than it is about appreciating any kind of complexity.
You and I can, of course, do it up any way we want. But it’s an interesting thing to taste and compare the same bacon cooked at two or three different degrees of doneness.