January 4, 2015: First Post of the New Year; the Big Book of Bacon, and Paulina Market smoked

MY LIFE WITH BACON continues this week with Chicago bacon from the Paulina Market and PeaPod, a gift bacon book, and some bacon news. Oddly, some of these pictures don't post properly; I'll have to look into why.  If you encounter problems, please let me know.

BACON IN THE NEWS 

As previously  mentioned, December 30^th was National Bacon day; as this article says, “not to be confused with International Bacon Day, celebrated on the Saturday before Labor Day.”  The photo above is from the “Bacon Shell Taco”, which was the “centerpiece of the Bacon Day celebration at B.C. Café in Davie” (Florida).  I’ve often thought that the invention of a bacon taco shell form (like the Bacon Bowl) would be a great innovation.  Place your bacon on the taco form and bake; out comes a crispy bacon taco shell.  You can have the idea, for free. 

Daughter Caitlin gave me a cool, large format, thick book called “The BigBook of Bacon” for Christmas.  Lots of recipes and printed in a large font – easy on the eyes (is she trying to tell me something about my age?) – and lots of great pictures.  Guess which bacon is illustrated in the opening section?  Nueske’s!




Of course.  It’s featured in a lot of great restaurants nationwide and is an outstanding bacon.  I disagree with a few of the author’s assessments, including rating Farmland very high… but the book has a lot of great recipes and I’ll be using it for years to come.



For New Year's, we got three sizeable lobsters from Supreme Lobster & Seafood, a premier seafood supplier to Chicago's best restaurants, (image not linked)

and three bone-in ribeye steaks from The Fresh Market in Lake Forest.  (Image not linked.)

The side dish was cauliflower mashed - simply steamed cauliflower heads with a stick of Kerry Gold salted butter.  Incredibly succulent, rich, flavorful dinner.  I am so lucky.

THIS WEEK’S BACON IS FROM THE PAULINA MARKET in Chicago, IL, by way of PeaPod.  My friend Thomas Parkinson, co-founder of PeaPod and its sister company, itemMaster, highly recommended that I use the PeaPod home delivery service and get some of their bacon.


I did so! The Paulina Market has a nice website (although upon clicking "Pork", I couldn't find bacon, and the pork belly was missing its image) and I think I'll be visiting their brick & mortar store too.

This bacon was packaged in a plain wrapper but a great silvered, heavy cardboard backing, which made it tremendously easy to peel off and put on the skillet.

It wasn’t labelled for weight, so I’m guessing it was about a pound.  I didn’t do my normal pre and post cooking weighing, as I was too anxious to cook this batch. As it began to warm up, the bacon exhibited translucency - indicating over-curing salts.  I was not initially optimistic. 

The bacon cooked up neatly with minimal stickiness and almost no curl.  As a result, I got pretty even slices, with the trademark protein/meat stripes all lined up.  This was obviously a transitional package, going from main line pork belly pieces to the end pieces, of which there were several.  The end pieces were much more meaty and had a ‘hammy’ look to them.

Wife Debbie commented that the bacon was “succulent but not much bacon flavor,” while son Sam remarked that the bacon was “outstanding”. For me, the bacon had a real melt-in-your-mouth succulence while retaining some serious crispyness – a rare combination.  I felt like it had strong traditional bacon flavor and while the mainline pieces were correctly very fatty, the dissolvability quotient outweighed any lack of protein.   The end pieces were really meaty and naturally had more bacon flavor.  Highly recommended, I’d give it a 3.75 on flavor, 4 on succulence, 4 on crispness.  Good stuff and will be buying again.