We can already hear some of you saying, “Ewwww…. Yuck! Frying the black pepper would make the bacon taste NASTY!”
In response to your uneducated and quite premature response to the idea of Black Pepper Bacon we say, “Good! That means more Black Pepper Bacon for us!”
Appearance:
Take a look at the dark and lovely meatiness of the bacon. Given the fact that we picked up this from a large volume retailer of grocery products and every other type of item imaginable you can understand why we found ourselves quite impressed with the appearance of Black Pepper Bacon.
We seriously expected to find a nasty looking, slime covered wad of sub-standard bacon with black pepper clumps haphazardly added… but nope! We got a pound of gorgeous, meaty bacon covered with a very nice coating of black pepper and other seasonings.
Take a closer look at the Black Pepper Bacon and TRY to tell us you don’t feel drool building up in your mouth! We dare you!
Cooking the Bacon:
Given that we had thick slices to cook, instinct told us to keep a close watch on the heat so as not to wind up with crispy outsides and uncooked middles. Now THAT, good people, would make even some die-hard bacon lovers say, “Yuck!” — but not us. Lol. We’d still eat it.
At first the black pepper bacon laid pretty still and didn’t have a lot of ‘curling up’ going on. that caught our attention and caused us to wonder if perhaps we ought to turn the heat up, but we stayed strong in our belief that this bacon would require gentler heating due to its thickness and refrained from cranking up the heat.
Soon we started to hear the beloved sound of bacon cooking in our pan and even though we saw very little curling taking place, the rich, meaty smell of bacon cooking which filled the air provided us with more than enough proof that we made the right decision when it came to the cooking temperature.
Above you see what four strips of the Black Pepper Bacon looked like right before we flipped them over. Beautiful site, right? The piece on the far right came from the end of the slab so it had a great deal more pepper on one side than all the other pieces — except, of course, for the piece on the OTHER end of the slab.
All About the Bacon Grease:
After our encounter with Fresh Market Bacon a few weeks ago we have started to pay closer attention to the volume of grease produced by (8) eight strips of bacon.
Why did we opt to use eight strips and not ten, twenty or even just one strip as the metering point? Simple: We noticed that after cooking eight strips of Fresh Market Bacon we had a serious need to pour out the bacon grease before we could cook more bacon in the pan. From that point forward we decided to take note of the grease level after cooking eight strips of bacon.
Not bad! Not bad at all! After cooking eight strips of Black Pepper Bacon we did not feel obligated to pour out the grease before cooking more bacon.
Final Appearances:
When it come to food some people base 99% of their opinion on its appearance. We feel that 100% of those same people would LOVE the way this bacon looked once we laid it out on a plate.
Look at those tasty meat strips laying their in all their glory. Needless to say we moved on to the taste test pretty rapidly.
Eating the Black Pepper Bacon:
Wow. The immediate taste did not smack us in face right away with the spiciness of its black pepper seasoning. Instead, we had time to start chewing for a bit before it snuck up on us and provided a very pleasant taste to accompany the savory bacon meat.
The Black Pepper Bacon did not get overly crispy and its meat retained a very enjoyable texture. We also noticed that the fatty portions did not fill our mouthes or coat our lips with slimy grease the way Slab Bacon did.
Conclusions:
This bacon will definitely become a regular purchase in our home. It looked wonderful right out of the package, cooked up without creating a gallon of grease, looked great in the pan, had a superb appearance after cooking, and its peppered exterior provided a delicious peppery taste that didn’t overwhelm the flavor of the bacon itself.
For those not able to keep up with all that, we can sum our experience with Black Pepper Bacon up in three words: We loved it!
We give “black pepper bacon” a final rating of 5 strips (out of 5). A perfect score!
Bacon Weaving?
Apparently the beers we drank during the cooking process resulted in some post-cooking insanity. We weaved together a bunch of black pepper bacon strips… for no apparent reason. Ha ha. Check it out!
Huh? What? you wanna’ get closer to the weaved black pepper bacon? No problem!
