Welcome to another MoreBaconPlease.Com Bacon Review. This time we spotted a name brand bacon (Hormel Black Label) at a good price at the grocery store and just HAD to pick some up. Actually we picked up two packages, but shhhhh…. Don’t tell anyone.
We had long wanted to try the Hormel Black Label Bacon because it looked so good in its package but the steep prices stores charged always kept it from winding up in our shopping cart.
So anyways, we hopped home in a hurry to begin the bacon sampling ‘cuz our bacon instincts told us we would find this particular sampling quite enjoyable. We could hardly wait to rip off that plastic and view the Hormel Black Label Bacon in all its meaty glory!
Wow. Just LOOK at the nice, solid chunks of pink/red meaty streaks in this stuff. We definitely liked what we saw so far and thought, “Wow. This bacon will look GREAT in a pan!”
So naturally, like good little bacon lovers, we broke out the trusty frying pan and lined it with strips of our recently purchased meat strips. Seemed only right to us, ya’ know? Have Bacon, Must Cook!
Oh geez. In our haste to get to the end of this blog posting (where we stuff our faces with bacon) we forgot to mention a really cool feature of the Hormel Black Label Bacon: Its smell!
The bacon had a wonderful smoky aroma to it right out of the package. Now don’t get it twisted. We don’t mean the bacon smacked us in the scent catchers with a cheap, chemical smoke flavoring odor. OUR bacon smelled delightful. We picked up hints of hickory and a bit of molasses or something slightly sweet.
Now back to the bacon cooking… which we ought to have paid more attention to the first round. Oops. Apparently beer drinking and making fun of each other distracted us and the first batch came out a little, um, crispy.
Ha ha. Still tasted GREAT, though! We didn’t overcook it TOO badly and we paid a lot more attention the second batch we cooked.
This naturally brings us to the issue of ‘bacon grease generated after cooking 8 strips’. Some poeple don’t care about this statistic, but we do.
Why? Aside from disliking the feeling we get when hot bacon grease pops out of the pan repeatedly and onto our skin, we figure that more grease left in the pan after cooking means less material to put in our mouths.
So without further ado, please give a warm welcome to the grease left after cooking TEN pieces of Hormel Black Label Bacon. Why ten this time? Simple: We had room in the pan for one extra strip each round of cooking. Duh!
Yep. The Hormel Black Label Bacon cooked up deliciously and left a very respectably low amount of grease in the pan after ten pieces.
Conclusions:
We will buy this bacon again as long as the sale price stays in effect. It had a great meaty appearance in its uncooked state and gave off what we considered a ‘good’ and ‘authentic’ smoky aroma before cooking.
While cooking it didn’t generate a tone of bacon grease and yes, of course the whole house smelled like bacon during and after the cooking process. We never can get enough of that smell, either. Go figure.
Taste and texture of the Hormel Black Label socred quite highly with us. Good bacon meat flavor mixed with just the right amount of saltiness. We had plenty to chew on but the chewing never became tedious.
So in the end, we chose to give Hormel Black Label Bacon a score of 4 strips (out of five). Why only four? We think the product rocks, yes, but with its normal pricing as high as we have previously seen it, well, you figure it out.
Cheap bastards? Us? Yes! Paying too much for ANYthing, even bacon, will NEVER make sense to us.
Now can anyone loan us a few bucks so we can get a few slabs of bacon? We’ll gladly pay you next Friday for some bacon today… 
