Quarterly Bacon Report Food Club

When your bacon arrives, you can store it in the refrigerator or the freezer. Once the bacon is opened, it will be good in the fridge for about a week. Unopened bacon in the vacuum-sealed package will keep for about 3 weeks in the fridge and up to 12 months in the freezer, so seize the opportunity to stock up!

Your bacon can take the heat because it’s cured. Curing is a traditional way to preserve meat that pre-dates the invention of refrigeration by several thousand years. Curing keeps meat safe by making it inhospitable to the microbes that would otherwise cause rot. Most commonly, this is done by salting, smoking, and drying.

When cured slowly and traditionally, these techniques not only make the meat safe to keep, they also make it extra delicious.

How does it ship?

In the warmer months (early April to mid September), we ship bacon with two business day service plus warm weather care. Dry ice will evaporate, ice packs may melt, but they will have done their job of preventing the bacon from cooking on its journey. The rest of the year (late September to the end of March), the bacon will ship with our flat rate service (1-4 business days). 

When should I be concerned?

There are some uh-oh signs. If the packaging is puffy or torn, if the color looks grey or un-bacony, or if there are any unusual odors, then that means the bacon might not have survived the trip. Let us know and we’ll make it right!

The late, great R.W. Apple, longtime writer and editor of the New York Times, once called Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Bacon “the beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of Rashers.” What impressed him—and frankly, impresses me, too—was the bacon’s balance. It’s intensely porky, nicely smoky, never too salty, with a slightly maple-sweet flavor. There are a lot of things that contribute to the flavor, from the kind of hogs used to what they’re fed to the curing method to the proportion of sugar, salt, and spices in the rub. Yet after one visit to the Nueske’s production facility in Wittenberg, Wisconsin, Apple had it figured out. He wrote, “the key to the flavor and consistency of Nueske bacon… lies in the smokehouse.”

Nueske’s has been building identical smokehouses for 80 years.

The original Nueske smokehouse stands in front of the company’s retail pork shop. It’s functional, but today it’s just for show. There are 32 smokehouses built to match it, though, and those are in use every day. They’re all built according to the same original plans—why mess with success? Many of them have been smoking for decades. As the smokehouses get older, the smoky aroma is more deeply ingrained, and they get better and better, like a well-seasoned cast iron pan.

Each smokehouse is about the size of a walk-in closet. You might be imagining a small village of tiny houses in the forest, chimneys puffing away, but these days the smokehouses are all indoors, in an enormous smoking room. They are watched by smokemaster Mike, who’s been overseeing the smoking at Nueske’s for more than twenty years. Mike retains the final say in the smoking. He says when each slab of bacon is done. Since each batch smokes for 24 hours and they smoke seven days a week, that means Mike is on call 24/7, you know, for smoking emergencies.

The Nueske family smokes with real applewood logs.

The recipe came from Wilhelm and Wilhelmina Nueske, who emigrated from Prussia to Wisconsin in 1887. Two generations later in 1933, R.C. Nueske, started selling applewood smoked meats made with the family recipe. The same recipe is still used today.

Smoking with applewood might not seem that distinctive, given how much bacon out there is labeled as “applewood.” But as Tanya Nueske, R.C.’s granddaughter and the fifth-generation bacon maker leading the company today, explains it, “‘applewood smoke’ can mean almost anything these days—apple juice, apple smoke flavoring, liquid smoke… But we only use real logs of Wisconsin applewood.” There’s a whole room in the Nueske’s production facility that’s filled with nothing but piles and piles of applewood logs, ready for smoldering and smoking. Using those logs creates a sweet, aromatic smoke that gives the bacon so much of its flavor. Using shortcuts like smoke flavoring or even applewood sawdust doesn’t give bacon the same depth.

Nueske’s smokes each batch of bacon for up to 24 hours. That’s much longer than the industry standard, which is an hour or two at most, if they smoke at all—many just pour on liquid smoke flavoring. That full day of smoking gives the sweet, smoky aroma time to totally penetrate the meat.

Most of the applewood comes from a couple of hours away in nearby Door County, Wisconsin. Door has thousands of acres of fruit orchards, and many of them are apple. Each year the trees are pruned and the byproduct is plenty of applewood. The abundance of orchard “waste” is probably what led Wilhelm and Wilhelmina to start smoking with it 130 years ago, but I bet they chose to keep smoking with it exclusively because they loved the flavor it imparts. Different woods give different flavors. Applewood smoke gives a subtle sweetness to the meat that balances incredibly well with the savory smokiness.

Good winemakers often make wine from the grapes grown in their own vineyards. Excellent olive oils are most often pressed from the olives of a single estate’s groves. Farmstead cheeses, made only with the milk of the cheesemaker’s own herd, are revered at most good cheese counters. Being involved in every step of the process creates tastier food because the makers can tweak any part of the system. The cheesemaker that doesn’t like the way the milk is tasting can change the field where the animals are grazing or adjust their supplemental feed. If recent heavy rains have been watering down the milk, they can adjust the recipe.

But there are next to no “farmstead” meats. There is almost nowhere in the US where the farm, the abattoir (slaughterhouse), and the curing room are all the same place.

Why is it so rare to have farmstead bacon?

The short answer is regulation. To run an abattoir, you have to have a USDA inspector on site whenever you’re processing animals. You also have to produce a mountain of paperwork to show that everything was done to keep the food safe. That regulation has its benefits—it (hopefully) stops us from ever living with another jungle like the one described by Upton Sinclair. But it is an immense burden for anyone trying to run a small operation. Little guys trying to do it all have been effectively squeezed out of the market. That is, nearly all the little guys.

Greg Gunthorp is one of very few farmstead meat makers in the country.

Two decades ago, Greg Gunthorp realized there was no way he could make a living raising pigs on pasture when he was forced to sell them for just five cents a pound—lower than the price during the depression. But Greg, a fourth-generation pig farmer who grew up knowing he wanted to raise pigs, wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. So he decided to build his own processing plant and sell pork instead of pigs. His meats are a treasure.

Greg does it all, and you can taste the difference.

Greg raises heritage breed Duroc pigs. They live their whole lives out on pasture. They get as much non-GMO grain as they want, plus their pick of whatever grows in their woods. They’re never given hormones, growth promotants, or antibiotics. When their time has come, they go to the abattoir on the same property where they’ve spent their whole lives. Greg and his team then break down the cuts. Many are sold fresh to local restaurants, butcher shops, and meat curers (including Smoking Goose, the folks behind our Zingerman’s exclusive pecan-smoked ham).

Greg makes his own bacon. He dry cures the pork bellies in a mix of salt and celery salt for 7 days. They’re smoked in the on-site smokehouse over a mix of applewood and hickory logs. The result is a fantastic, flavorful bacon that Greg oversees from farrow to fork. It’s as delicious as it is rare.