At first we had some confusion over the term ‘market bacon’ because we picked this More Bacon Please blog posting’s selection up from a local butcher shop. It seemed more logical to us that market bacon ought to come from a supermarket and after a heated exchange amongst ourselves on the topic, we decided to say, “Ah Hell… Let’s just cook the f’ing bacon and see what happens.
With the nomenclature issue behind us, we carefully unwrapped our parcel of fresh cut market bacon and laid it out on the counter. We had some doubts right off the bat. It looked… very fatty and also it seemed as though they had sliced it extremely thin.
We had some difficulty separating the slices due to their thin nature, but we quickly got our slices of market bacon into the pan to see how they would handle the heat. We opted for a smaller pan since all our larger ones had, um, well, not gotten cleaned before we started our experiment with the market bacon.
No one ever SAID we would get a prize from Better Homes and Gardens for housekeeping, but we also don’t live like TOTAL slobs…. usually. But never mind that. Let’s get back to the bacon!
Within seconds of heat hitting the market bacon strips we heard popping and sizzling. Though we adore the sound of bacon cooking, that much popping and sizzling from bacon so early in the cooking process would certainly mean our bacon strips would generate a TON of bacon grease.
Yep. After only EIGHT strips of market bacon had gone into the pan we had to perform an Emergency De-Greasing of the pan AND wipe down the stove. Despite using a modest heat level we still had a massive number of bacon grease splatter marks all over the stove, counter and floor next to the stove.
Now let us remind you that the following quanitity of bacon grease came from ONLY eight strips of bacon…
Some people would have given up hope at this point and written the concept of market bacon off completely because of the grease given off. Those people don’t really love bacon and clearly ought to hand over all their supply of bacon to the real bacon lovers in this world — namely us.
Ther strips held their long slender shapes quite well during the cooking process and gave off what we called a ‘traditional’ bacon smell. Their color developed into a nice shade of brown and when placed on a plate and blotted gently with a paper towel they looked pretty darn tasty.
Time to put appearance, smell and grease production aside… and give market bacon its most important test: We call it the “Stuffing a Piece into One’s Face Test” and we don’t mind signing up as guinea pigs for this one. Consider it our sacrifice for the sake of other bacon lovers worldwide.
- Crunchy. Varied cooking times did not seem to change this characteristic too much. Not too crunchy, as each piece still seemed to have some meatiness to it that required chewing.
- Salty. This type of bacon definitely had some serious sodium. It didn’t parch us to the point where we felt the need to shotgun beers immediately after each piece, but we definitely noticed the salt.
- Not as greasy as we initially expected. With all those gallons (not literally) of bacon grease we siphoned off with a sump pump (somewhat exaggerated) we expected the bacon to have a slimy, soggy, greasy finish — but it didn’t. Totally cool with OUR tastebuds.
Conclusion:
Not at all what we expected to get from a butcher shop and we decided that the term ‘market’ in market bacon’s name referred to its remarkable similarity in appearance, taste, texture, and ability to produce copious amounts of grease in a very short period of time. Definitely a great bacon to choose if entertaining a large group for breakfast or brunch and you want to serve a bacon that pretty much everyone will like because it DOES so closely resemble most common bacons from the supermarket.
We would like to note that we do not recommend market bacon for a BLT or other bacon-oriented dish where meatiness of the bacon would make or break the project.
In the end we give “market bacon” a final rating of 3 strips (out of 5).
