October 20, 2013: Schmeissser's Bacon and Hormel Video Contest

MY LIFE WITH BACON continues with a review of a famous Chicago butcher's in-store cured bacon, and some Bacon In The News.

THE NEWS THIS WEEK was pretty cool:  Hormel sponsored a video contest - who can produce the best short video on the subject of bacon?  They call it the 2013 International Bacon Film Festival, and the YouTube playlist can be found here.  The winner shouldn't have won, in my opinion. A young man with a banjo sings a hokey song about bacon, and waxes thickly about his bacon fantasies.  Make up your own mind, however.  BBDO did the work for Hormel, and they said it was a very efficient way to grab attention, declining to say how much the campaign cost.  A very cool banner image.

AN INTERESTING SITE CALLED FOODSPIN reports on a scientific study that concludes: bacon improves everything except pasta and desert.  They call it the "Ultimate Ingredient". The study can be found here, but it's one of those "I knew that" kinds of studies.  I'll even bet it got federal funding.

Quoting the article:

"It's a clever methodology: Cliff Kuang and his team broke down 49,733 recipes on the Food Network website by category (ex: "lettuce"), split the categories by whether the recipe called for bacon or not, and then used the site's 906,539 ratings to calculate the average score for the bacon and non-bacon recipes. Bacon generally improved ratings—as you can see in the graphic above—but it dramatically bumped up sandwiches and asparagus. Desserts and pasta (!) were the only two foodstuffs that saw a decline."

 The graphic tells the whole story:

FINALLY, NOT-SO-GOOD-NEWS, if you believe it.  Supposedly, men who eat a lot of bacon have lower sperm counts.  This study can be found here, but it's important to note that it's CORRELATION - NOT CAUSATION.  This one is based on a survey of what people say they eat, and we know from work in market research, that recall is very poor.  I can tell you anecdotally (which is not scientific), that I have five kids, so eating lots of bacon had no effect on me.

ON TO THE BACON!  Today, I reviewed bacon from my favorite Chicago butcher: Schmeisser's Sausage (it's just their name; they sell EVERYTHING meat-y).  I've purchased absolutely astounding meats of all types - from veal shanks to prime steaks.  They supply lots of restaurants and in addition to my personal experience, they have a great reputation.  A great looking website, too:

Schmeisser's bacon package was nice, and the weight was 1 pound one ounce, and it weighed in at 1.12 ounces; a slight bonus.  Post cooking, it came in at 4.3 ounces of finished bacon, and produced 125 ml of bacon fat.  No scent at all; couldn't tell if it was smoked or not.  But it was clearly cured.

At the outset, it looked a little over-cured.  The translucent fat gives that away:

It did cook up nicely, and had a marbled appearance.  Pieces broke apart as if they were crispy:

However, the taste didn't live up to my expectations.  Crispy factor, only 2.5 our of 5 - average.  Succulence was VERY low - minimal fatty pieces, and so it scored only 1.5 out of 5 there. 

Worst of all, this is the first bacon I've tasted that was DRY.  Very puzzling, since it didn't produce a ton of rendered fat.  It was kind of chewy.

Overall, very disappointing for the quality of the establishment.  Maybe I got an unhappy pig!

Have a good week everyone, and enjoy your bacon.