Bacon Crispy and Delicious

This is a photo of Covered Wagon Brand Sliced Bacon (10 lbs. pork) Bulk, which is a product with a cherry red lean color and a golden brown fat side color. I think that bacon is best cooked in cast iron because the heat can be controlled more evenly throughout the cooking process.

Everything Tastes Better with Bacon: 70 Fabulous Recipes for Every Meal of the Day, Sara Perry grandly proclaimed on the cover of her 2002 cookbook. Since then, the love of bacon has grown to surreal heights; it’s become a collective obsession. Should you get the urge, it’s easy to order some bacon ice cream, bacon-infused vodka, bacon soap, or even a monstrosity called the bacon explosion, which is essentially a loaf of bacon-wrapped sausage with yet more bacon.


Arun Gupta of The Indypendent explained that bacon has six ingredients with umami (Japanese for savory) flavor. But that’s always been true, and while we’ve been eating bacon for centuries, the kind of mania that exists in America today is a new trend. A Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) report from September 2010 found a recent surge in pork belly (where bacon comes from) prices, which have climbed steadily since 1998. Earlier this year, the CME retired frozen pork belly futures after 40 years of trading. In the olden days, when bacon was a seasonal treat, buyers could store frozen pork bellies and sell them once demand was high. But in the past decade, our love affair with bacon has become a constant, year-round obsession. We don’t need pork belly frozen and stored, we want the stuff right now and keep it coming. Now, bacon goes on everything, all the time.


Oscar Mayer started packaging pre-sliced bacon in 1924, and soon bacon became a staple of the American family breakfast. As Chris Cosentino, founder of Boccalone: Tasty Salted Pig Parts, pointed out: “You look at classic Norman Rockwell pictures of people at a diner, and what are they eating? Bacon and eggs.” Bacon is the iconic food memory of most people’s childhoods—which makes it the ultimate comfort food. The memory of the many women of our family sizzling up some bacon for breakfast is my experience, and to me it is equal to if not more American than apple pie. Bacon has an especially great taste and wonderful aroma; it’s a nostalgic trigger for the fuzzy golden heydays of my past.

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