Product Review: Creswick Farms Hickory Smoked Bacon

This is what bacon is meant to be.

It fries up nicely with a savory aroma that makes you want to just eat the stuff as you're cooking it and never mind the meal. The hickory aroma fills the kitchen and blends very well with the salt. This is uncured bacon, with no nitrites added. The slices are not uniform like corporate bacon--they're generally wider on one end and a bit thicker--and they have a much better meat-to-fat ratio. This is seriously meaty bacon, and the thickness makes it nice and toothsome. If you like your bacon to be really crisp and crunchy to the point of being crumbly you'll have to cook this a bit longer than you're used to. If, like me, you enjoy bacon that's crisp but still needs to be chawed on some, you'll love it.

We had breakfast for dinner last night. Our oldest, Alex, did the pancakes. We used an organic mix**, alas, but we put in an egg and some strawberries from the farmer's market. While he was flipping the pancakes, I fried the bacon. After the bacon was done (I cooked the whole package--couldn't stop myself!) I used the grease to fry up a few eggs (from Hampshire Farms; I'm pretty sure LVL offers these). The bacon grease lent a nice hickory undertone to the eggs, and they needed no salt or pepper. Next time, though, I'll turn down the heat a bit before cracking the eggs in. The edges got a bit crisper than I usually like.

We really missed bacon. We haven't indulged ourselves in a long time, though, now that we know a bit about what happens to corporate bacon before it becomes bacon. This bacon is everything bacon should be and more, without the baggage. It passes our cost test, but even if it didn't, its superior taste and quality would make it worth the extra cost. We don't eat a lot of bacon--or meat in general, for that matter--but the next bacon we buy is going to be from Creswick Farms. I really hope they also do ham.


**Does anyone have a good scratch recipe for buttermilk pancakes? We made butter out of some Calder's cream (also from LVL!) it was delicious on the pancakes, but now we've got all this buttermilk and nothing to do with it.