Restaurant Orsay: Chef's Blog - The Branding of Bacon: Smoke (and Mirrors?)
Chef's Blog - The Branding of Bacon: Smoke (and Mirrors?)
Been thinking about bacon more than usual for the past week or so. Lots of Easter brunch menus flying around, I guess.
Having just discovered a Wikipedia entry detailing the phenomenon of “Bacon Mania” (look it up), and having meant for a long time to start a series of missives promoting some of the foodstuffs that I’m most proud of using at the restaurant, I find that I’ve just constructed a very awkwardly formulated sentence and have no idea of how to appropriately end it. Thusly…
Applewood smoked bacon seems to have become the de facto standard for what I’d call a “premium” bacon (“premium” referring to the fact that the restaurant or grocer or meat packer feels it’s important enough to make a point of it, rather than just saying, well, “bacon”).
Is applewood smoked bacon better than “regular” bacon (“regular” meaning that the menu or package just says “bacon”, without any mention of the intrinsic bacon enhancing properties of the vaunted applewood)? I’d say, “Maybe”.
Apple is a very common smoking wood, especially with pork. Your standard smoking woods are, for the most part, from either fruit trees or nut trees. Maybe people like applewood with their bacon because we all know pork chops and apple sauce go together, more so at least than, say, pork chops and grapefruit, or mulberry, or nectarine.
I’m of the opinion that in the bacon-making equation of [pork] + [salt] + [smoke] = [bacon], pork is doubtlessly the most important factor. Smoking an average quality pork belly over the sweetest, most apple-y chunks of applewood that have ever been set alight will still yield average bacon.
At Orsay, we use bacon from Eden Farms, a coalition of farmers from Iowa that produce Berkshire pork. Berkshire is a heritage (or “heirloom”, if you prefer) breed of swine – one of a few scores of classified breeds. Berkshire is a 300 year old breed, one of the gold standards of the pork world – in the form of a mathematical proportion, we could state something like…
Berkshire : pork = Wagyu : beef
The vast (seriously, seriously vast) majority of bacon, “applewood smoked” or not, comes from industrially produced swine, inconsistently bred from millions of genetic lines, raised on a diet which includes liberal doses of animal by-products, growth promoting additives, and antibiotics.
Eden Farms raises pigs naturally on a vegetarian, all grain diet, with a focus on humane animal husbandry and ecologically sustainable farming practices.
Oh, and the results are delicious. We use their bacon exclusively, in any dish that needs bacon (and there are lots of those).
Roasted with a little spinach and Parmigiano-Reggiano on top of fresh Gulf oysters…
Cut into lardons and mixed into a spinach salad, we take some of the rendered fat and mix it into the vinaigrette as well…
We’ve been known to use it in everything from pate to ice cream…
Now also available during Sunday brunches, unadorned, in all its porky glory, sans any extraneous garnish, in really thick hand-cut slices (really hand cut, like with a knife, not a powered rotary slicer)…
Having just discovered a Wikipedia entry detailing the phenomenon of “Bacon Mania” (look it up), and having meant for a long time to start a series of missives promoting some of the foodstuffs that I’m most proud of using at the restaurant, I find that I’ve just constructed a very awkwardly formulated sentence and have no idea of how to appropriately end it. Thusly…
Applewood smoked bacon seems to have become the de facto standard for what I’d call a “premium” bacon (“premium” referring to the fact that the restaurant or grocer or meat packer feels it’s important enough to make a point of it, rather than just saying, well, “bacon”).
Is applewood smoked bacon better than “regular” bacon (“regular” meaning that the menu or package just says “bacon”, without any mention of the intrinsic bacon enhancing properties of the vaunted applewood)? I’d say, “Maybe”.
Apple is a very common smoking wood, especially with pork. Your standard smoking woods are, for the most part, from either fruit trees or nut trees. Maybe people like applewood with their bacon because we all know pork chops and apple sauce go together, more so at least than, say, pork chops and grapefruit, or mulberry, or nectarine.
I’m of the opinion that in the bacon-making equation of [pork] + [salt] + [smoke] = [bacon], pork is doubtlessly the most important factor. Smoking an average quality pork belly over the sweetest, most apple-y chunks of applewood that have ever been set alight will still yield average bacon.
At Orsay, we use bacon from Eden Farms, a coalition of farmers from Iowa that produce Berkshire pork. Berkshire is a heritage (or “heirloom”, if you prefer) breed of swine – one of a few scores of classified breeds. Berkshire is a 300 year old breed, one of the gold standards of the pork world – in the form of a mathematical proportion, we could state something like…
Berkshire : pork = Wagyu : beef
The vast (seriously, seriously vast) majority of bacon, “applewood smoked” or not, comes from industrially produced swine, inconsistently bred from millions of genetic lines, raised on a diet which includes liberal doses of animal by-products, growth promoting additives, and antibiotics.
Eden Farms raises pigs naturally on a vegetarian, all grain diet, with a focus on humane animal husbandry and ecologically sustainable farming practices.
Oh, and the results are delicious. We use their bacon exclusively, in any dish that needs bacon (and there are lots of those).
Roasted with a little spinach and Parmigiano-Reggiano on top of fresh Gulf oysters…
Cut into lardons and mixed into a spinach salad, we take some of the rendered fat and mix it into the vinaigrette as well…
We’ve been known to use it in everything from pate to ice cream…
Now also available during Sunday brunches, unadorned, in all its porky glory, sans any extraneous garnish, in really thick hand-cut slices (really hand cut, like with a knife, not a powered rotary slicer)…