Garrett County Hickory Bacon
July 20, 2010 by Marianne
July 20, 2010 • Filed Under: Bacon Reviews , Garrett County bacon, uncured bacon
On the Fourth of July, I was shopping at our local fancy-schmancy grocery store, Lazy Acres. It’s like the small-town version of a Whole Foods. I love their produce, their cheese department, their fantastic wine and liquor selection, and…the meat and seafood case. It’s so hard to walk by it without buying SOMETHING. Just one artisan-crafted sausage. Or maybe a small piece of ahi to have as an appetizer. Well, on this day my eye was drawn to a package of bacon. It first caught my attention because the slices were so thin I thought it was some sort of prosciutto. I picked it up and flipped it over and was amazed by the low fat content.
This, it turned out, was Garrett County’s hickory-smoked, uncured bacon. Unlike most bacon aficionados, I really like those rare thin slices you find hidden in a normal package. Thick cut-bacon doesn’t always win me over, and I was totally intrigued by this very different looking product. So, refusing to acknowledge a price, I threw the bacon in my basket and moved on.
When I buy a new bacon, I like to try it plain the first time. So I opened it up, pulled out a few slices and threw them in the skillet. Well, maybe it wasn’t that simple. First of all, before cooking, it smelled very smoky, almost more like ham than bacon. When I removed my slices from the package, the bacon was so thin it was difficult to get out of the package without tearing, and they stretched a great deal. I actually thought I had three slices when indeed it was four, but I wasn’t likely to complain about that. As you can see in this photo, there really was a lot less fat, which meant much less grease produced during cooking.
It was difficult to cook them evenly, I suppose because of the diminished grease content. I would have liked them to be more crisp overall, but I took them out before certain areas of the bacon could burn. The flavor was really good, but again, not necessarily what I would associate with a favorite bacon…more like a tasty ham. Or rather, what I wish ham tasted like, because I don’t love ham. I think the rest of the package will be used as an ingredient. For instance, I was planning to make some split pea soup soon. This will be the perfect smoky, salty bacon for that use.
This is what I love about American food culture. At any given moment I may run across a food from anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. We have such a ridiculous wealth of food variety at our fingertips, and I want to taste it all. So maybe this won’t be my new breakfast favorite, but it was definitely worth a try. I’m always on the lookout for new and different bacon products to try. And yet I still haven’t had the KFC Double Down…hmmm. Maybe I don’t really want to taste it ALL.
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Once again, Royal Bacon Society was fortunate to receive some product for review, and some coupons to share with our readers! Representatives of Kraft asked us to try their new Deli Deluxe Bacon Cheddar. As much as I love to buy stinky cheese from the local shop, there’s this kid in me that still loves a fat slice of American cheese on my burger, just the way my mom used to make. While this product insists it is cheddar, the consistency and flavor really reminded me of American, so I proceeded under this assumption.
First we got a few slices out and had a look. The cheese didn’t smell like liquid smoke, which was a definite positive. So many “bacon” products are really just smoke enhanced with no actual bacon involved. Not so with these slices. There were evident bits of bacon in each slice. I dug one out and tried it and, as far as I could tell, it was just a tiny piece of bacon. Nothing weird or texturally creepy about it. Two points for the cheese.
Next we threw some burgers on the grill and topped it with a slice. Like good American slices, this cheese melted beautifully without adding any extra grease to the formula. I assembled my burger with the usual condiments, pickles, lettuce, tomato and took my first bite. Sadly, the bacon flavor was drowned out by all the other ingredients. We decided to try a few bites of just the burger and cheese (no bun, no condiments) and found that the bacon flavor was there, just not strong.
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