Why is your bacon so good?

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Fan0Horror@reddit

Don't forget jowl bacon!

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Lucky-Paperclip-1@reddit

Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!

FreddyDeus@reddit

You haven’t got anyone. Bacon is defined by being cured, not smoked.

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thloki@reddit

It looks like Oz bacon is a combination of both loin & belly. It should be the best of both worlds.

Adventurous_Web_6958@reddit

Bacon in Europe is often much saltier than in the US. At least in central Europe.

haveanairforceday@reddit

I saw a video where an Irish person tried American cornbread and really liked it. I felt appreciated lol

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slrogio@reddit

And the best cornbread is made with bacon fat

Yeah that's a cookout. I'm not even southern, I'm Midwestern, and I've never heard bbq and cookout used interchangeably.

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Suppafly@reddit

I'm Midwestern, and I've never heard bbq and cookout used interchangeably.

Today some Canadians and Europeans insisted to this Carolinian that burgers on a gas grill is authentic barbecue

Is that actually what happened or did they just upset your feelings because they called a cook-out a barbecue, something that people in the US also do?

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Fun_Push7168@reddit

Whole argument with them repeatedly insisting that burgers on a gas grill is barbecue and the whole rest of the world agrees despite what our " backwater country" says etc etc.

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jedooderotomy@reddit

It's more excusable for folks from other countries. But my wife's family from California say something similar, and it makes me feel dead inside.

California has some of the best food in the world. But damn, they don't know their barbecue.

(and before someone says something, I'm aware that there are a ton of people in California and some of them know how to make barbecue. But my god, you're so good at so many foods and barbecue is usually not one of them)

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likesblackcoffeebest@reddit

As a Texan, I'm sorry you had to experience such blasphemy. Truly uncalled for.

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Cynobite608@reddit

Hank Hill would disapprove and he's a REAL Texan....lol. J/K

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likesblackcoffeebest@reddit

Hank Hill would ask them politely but firmly to leave lol

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Fun_Push7168@reddit

S11 ep3

Hank has Bobby build a barbecue pit with bill, it's wood fired. Hank explains that this is not cooking but rather the art of barbecue.

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creamcandy@reddit

Alabama agrees strongly.

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HorrorAlarming1163@reddit

The real reason for the revolutionary war

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Especially over biscuits, I mean it's more better for your heart with a couple extra sticks of butter 🤣

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ChalkButter@reddit

Growing up I didn’t have biscuits and gravy until I was in highschool (idk why my parents never let me try it prior) - but since then it’s been in my Top 5 favorite foods

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strawbebby-milk@reddit

the British schoolboys and the Irish people trying things are my two favorites!

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GlindaTheGoodKaren@reddit

There’s one where they gave them biscuits and gravy. It was fantastic.

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SheBeast14@reddit

I made my Scottish partner biscuits and gravy one time while visiting and they loved it so much. I couldn't find regular sausage so I used lorne and it was sooo good.

Was it northern or southern cornbread? Northern cornbread is typically made with some sugar added to the mix before baking. Southern cornbread leaves out the sugar.

That's a silly distinction to make, plenty of people in the south use sugar in theirs and vice versa. Hell the south is known for adding sugar to basically everything whether it needs it or not.

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damagetwig@reddit

Lots of us make sweet cornbread in the South cause we're so used to Jiffy.

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Invania21@reddit

But the sweet cornbread makes a TERRIBLE base for cornbread dressing for Thanksgiving! I tried using Jiffy once for dressing and it was practically inedible. I went back to the BH&G recipe for Christmas that year and my family forgave me for my lapse lol

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damagetwig@reddit

That's very true, I make it without sugar if I'm making dressing. I can't say I hate it that way (my mom made it that way haha) but I do like leaving the sugar out.

Honestly, the biggest difference I see between north and south on cornbread is whether or not you use a hot skillet or a baking pan/dish.

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pakrat1967@reddit

Yes but if you go to most southern cousine restaurants like Cracker Barrel l. The cornbread is unsweetened. The south makes up for the lack of sugar in cornbread by putting lots of it in their iced tea.

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BewilderedandAngry@reddit

So that's why I don't really like Cracker Barrel's cornbread!

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episcoqueer37@reddit

My Tennessean husband insists on Jiffy and only Jiffy. Eh, makes my life easier.

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SmallTownTrans1@reddit

It was a Dolly Parton box mix, as he couldn’t find most of the corn based ingredients in Ireland lol

mattenthehat@reddit

Hell yeah we're proud of our bacon. Have you seen Americans? We love bacon.

Idk what's wrong with the rest of the world's bacon, tbh. You'd have to ask a butcher, but it's definitely a thing. Except the French, they have good bacon.

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Cold_Elk947@reddit

The Philippines also has their version of bacon called tocino. It’s soooo good.

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carlitospig@reddit

Filipinos have excellent food, full stop. I would kill for lumpia right now.

(Actually, a change over the course of my 46 year old lifetime: we sell Lumpia at our fairs and events now. It used to be that you had to cajole someone’s aunty for months to make it for you.)

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Vee_Leigh@reddit

I roll about a hundred lumpia at a time and freeze them, uncooked, just pull some out when I want 'em.

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Cold_Elk947@reddit

I feel like in California, lumpia should be a staple at every event where there’s food involved. Like tacos.

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carlitospig@reddit

Agreed. 🥰

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noStepOnSeal@reddit

Ordering a fresh made pina colada at a beach bar on Palawan, the coconut scraps were fed to swine.

Filipino American jumping in. Tocino is great but it doesn’t have that crisp that regular bacon has.

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saskyfarmboy@reddit

The what now?

Tildengolfer@reddit

No. I understand. I just couldn’t remember how their last name was spelled. That’s a funny reference.

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Drew707@reddit

I don't remember how it was spelled, but I remember what they couldn't eat!

/s

Had an ex boyfriend who was raised vegetarian. In his rebellious teenage years, he’d try different meat products when out with his friends. His verdict? “I’m still vegetarian except for bacon.” He didn’t eat it often, but he would definitely eat it.

He didn’t make a big deal about it, and he agreed with his parents reasoning for vegetarianism for the most part. But bacon? That was a special occasion exception

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VariegatedPlumage@reddit

I have a good friend who is "vegan except for bacon." She realized bacon was the one animal product she couldn't give up-- she was fine nixing cheese and cream and eggs and everything else, but she just could not drop bacon.

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Ronnoc527@reddit

Does she suffer for it? I have to imagine her digestive system isn't used to it but the pleasure might be worth the pain.

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Holiday-Wall3751@reddit

As long as she’s doing it once a year, it shouldn’t. My sister quit vegetarianism with a bacon cheeseburger after five years, and no stomach issues.

She also came home and asked my dad if he’d ever tried putting bacon on a burger because it was delicious, and she thought he’d love it.

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Hefty-Rub7669@reddit

My husband can’t eat bacon for health reasons but every year on his birthday gets the best bacon burnt end tacos. It’s so good.

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BreadyStinellis@reddit

My sister in law does the same.

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Entire_Toe2640@reddit

Mine too! She’s from Georgia.

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OsvuldMandius@reddit

To sum up, problems with Euro bacon…

marty-mcfryguy@reddit

The main difference is that it's a completely different part of the pig -- belly (American) vs loin (UK). Belly is like 50/50 fat/protein, whereas loin is much, much leaner.

Also, American tends to be cut extremely thin, while UK is noticeable thicker.

So you end up with what's so great about American bacon: it's just enough meat/structure to hold a bunch of fat that completely fries itself. It ends up much more something you just want as a garnish, whereas UK is a nice meaty bite that feels more like a main. American gives you that crispy stick of rendered fat that just explodes in your mouth.

Oh, and the smoke, too. That's key to the flavor as well.

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ExtraBitter99@reddit

I love Irish bacon, sometimes. But nothing beats the thin strips of hickory smoked American style.

Yes, we love our bacon and add it to as many things as possible.

ButterscotchOdd8257@reddit

Yeah, we may screw up a lot of things, but you can't beat our bacon.
It's all pork belly, very fatty, salted and smoked. Pure indulgence.

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Educational-Big-6609@reddit

American bacon is amazing. Of course, it’s not good for you (yours isn’t, either), but the salt curing process probably makes it rather delicious.

min6char@reddit

I actually really like Irish bacon! Grass is always greener I suppose.

My understanding is that American bacon comes from a different cut than UK bacon. Additionally, we cook it crisp, where UK bacon is more floppy.

I don’t know how UK bacon is prepped, but we also tend to flavor and/or smoke the bacon.

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P00PooKitty@reddit

I’m from Boston, so I’ve obviously had irish bacon: the answer is that your bacon is basically porkbelly but not as good. Its way too thick and thus you have to char it to Even somewhat cook the center. Our bacon is much thinner and then on top of that its sweetened and smoked. So you have smoke+savory+sweet+salty+fatty which is all the things a brain wants in food except for a hit of acid.

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Ok_Depth_6476@reddit

Yes, we are proud of our bacon! I don't know why it's different. Even Canadian bacon bears no resemblance to American bacon. (I think it's more like ham, although different from our ham). Ugh now I want bacon, and I don't have any, so I'm sad. Thanks.

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Frewtti@reddit

I was in Austria and they had some very similar bacon, but it was cut very thin, not as thick as we do in Canada/US.

FYI what Americans call Canadian bacon is what Canadians call Back Bacon, or peameal bacon which I think is similar to your bacon.

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Firefly_Magic@reddit

I love bacon. In the US we have very unique styles of bacon. Some preferred extra crispy some soft crispy. Hickory smoked, applewood smoked. Thick, thin.

American bacon is cut from the belly rather than the loin, the belly has more fat than the loin, which renders out when cooking, essentially frying the meat in its own fat

Also most if not all of our bacon is cured and smoked, so I’m sure that adds to the flavor

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65shooter@reddit

Streaky bacon is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy.

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Effective_Coach7334@reddit

our bacon is so good that even kosher jews make an exception for it. 😁

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Emergency_Coyote_662@reddit

there was a whole culture built around bacon in the early 2000s lol. yes we are proud

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AcousticOnomatopoeia@reddit

Weird, I always look at the fryup sub and envy the British bacon,it looks so good, a lot of our bacon is mostly the fat.

TheEstablishment7@reddit

American cured meat, at least where I live, was originally an export because pigs could be kept very cheaply here, much cheaper than they could be in Britain, because they could be driven into the swamps to fend for themselves, then rounded up when fat and slaughtered. The intensive agriculture and common law land rules in England made this impossible. Therefore, cheap pork was an early cash export. It was supposed to be able to keep in the bottom of a ship across the Atlantic in gigantic quantities to be eaten on ships or in Britain. The curing by salt and smoke was, accordingly, very extensive. After the locals started exporting tobacco and cotton instead, they kept eating it that way because they liked it. Meanwhile, it faded away on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

For a country that eats SO MUCH FUCKIN PORK, they just.... arent really into bacon at all.

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rstock1962@reddit

Full of delicious chemicals

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Yeah I went to UK last week and was disappointed by bacon.

I found that food tasted more bland in general, even things like pizza and burgers.

However I did feel significantly better eating European food

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IHaveBoxerDogs@reddit

We are obsessed with bacon. Saying we are proud is an understatement.

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Utterlybored@reddit

Don’t y’all have “streaky bacon” in stores?

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Helo227@reddit

I had the opposite experience. I went to Ireland for two weeks in 2014. Ever since then i cannot eat American bacon without feeling nauseous afterward. Irish bacon is so much better!

I read a quote from a comedian a long time ago I should share.

'all these health nuts are going to feel dumb someday when they're in the hospital dying of nothing'.

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Vachic09@reddit

Different part of the pig

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laz111@reddit

I prefer American bacon too, so yummy!

One time my family had houseguests and my mom was cooking bacon for breakfast. This young girl came down and said "OMG, what is that amazing smell!?"

LongRodVaughnDong@reddit

Bacon, American or foreign shouldn’t be eating regularly. I hate people that assume the American version is inherently worse.

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Playful_Emu_398@reddit

Irish/UK bacon is what Americans call Canadian bacon, comes from a completely different part of the pig.

American bacon is what Irish/UK call streaky bacon, BUT critically I think people from Ireland/UK criminally undercook their streaky bacon to the point it’s just pale, limp and slimy, which completely changes the entire experience and taste. Bacon in the US is cooked until it’s crispy. Try just cooking streaky bacon more and seeing if you like it

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Embarrassed-Cause250@reddit

Our bacon is the best & we know we have gold. So happy you were able to enjoy it. Not sure of the origin story of pur bacon, but I think the stomach area is used vs back area.

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Hyphum@reddit

I was in Ireland in ‘99 and I still have dreams of your wonderful bacon. So I guess what I’m saying is, let’s trade?

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Playful_Procedure991@reddit

Are we proud of our bacon? Does a bear sh@t in the woods?

You’re eating back bacon, from the loin. In the UK, you guys just call it bacon. In the US, we mostly call that Canadian bacon.

What you’re describing as American bacon is from the belly. In the UK, you guys call it streaky bacon. I’m sure you can find it.

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Fun_Push7168@reddit

Where I live, absolutely. There's a whole town named after it. ( Not really it's the opposite)

American bacon is fabulous, and versatile. The bacon grease itself is wonderful for cooking and flavoring other things. When I go on a bacon bender, I cook up a bunch of it and then fry eggs in the resulting grease. There's no better fried eggs than ones basically poached in a pan full of bacon fat. ❤️

Saltpork545@reddit

Hi, I'm a food nerd, and yes, our bacon is actually from the US.

While cured bacon of all kinds dates back likely to the English pre-1500s, De Soto's Spanish pigs coming to the US is where bacon likely first came to the US.

What we call Bacon or American bacon or streaky bacon is one of the forms of bacon that is historically called bacon and they didn't differentiate in a lot of the records we have, basically if it came off the side of a pig and got cured and sometimes smoked, it was bacon.

The American identity of bacon started in the 1840s and 1850s with the commercial sales of smoked, cured pork belly that were sold in slabs and cut then cooked as an alternative to salted pork. While this existed for decades, it really picked up support due to individually sliced pieces by Oscar Meyer in the 1920s and this style of bacon no longer had the protective cured and smoked outer layer, showing the quality of the meat in the packaging we still see much to this day.

To add to this and bacon and eggs becoming the breakfast food was due to advertising by a man named Edward Bernays with the Beech-Nut Packing Company, who also happened to sell bacon. Bernays is the grandfather of modern marketing and while bacon and eggs existed before, it wasn't until diner culture and the advertising from both Oscar Meyer and Beech Nut that it really fully hit the American cultural weight that we still see today.

Waffle House wouldn't exist the way it does today if Americans genuinely ate the way they did for breakfast in the 1800s before bacon and eggs became the norm.

Because it's a different cut.

It's smoked pork belly specifically bred and cut to be "bacon" then cured.

In the American south you can get specific cuts which would be treated differently in the rest of the world. Most if not all are smoke/salt cured.

There's bacon which implies a smoke cured meaty product. Best cooked slowly, rendering the fat until crispy. Or floppy if you (wrongly) like it that way.

There's also fatback (basically pork fat with skin attached). Used in Southern cooking for flavoring and sometimes eaten as a snack.

Please tell me you have had a chance to have fried rice w bacon in it? How about the multitude of other bacon based or amplified foods? Bacon in shrimp fajitas is great. Bacon jam. I honestly haven’t even had bacon since breakfast and am now considering air frying some just as a snack. (By the way, recently wrapped bacon around some hotdogs and air fried till it was crispy! My family loved it)

I’m glad you had it and loved it. I will come to Ireland some day and have some great food there I am sure.

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Efficient-Panic3506@reddit

American bacon is basically what happens when a country looks at pork belly and says “yeah but what if we added smoke, salt, and zero restraint”

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sonofkeldar@reddit

This is funny, because most Americans have never had “real” bacon. Traditional American bacon is heavily smoked and cured pork belly. You can keep it in your pantry, at room temperature, for months. It has a very smoky flavor. The stuff you get at the grocery store is minimally cured and usually has smoke flavor added (some of the premium brands do use real wood smoke, but it’s subtle). It has to be refrigerated.

Comparing the two is like comparing Dewars to Laphroaig. They’re both technically Scotch whisky, but one gives you a subtle hint of smokiness with a smooth finish, while the other makes you feel like a chimney sweep with a finish that is stronger than most prescription antibiotics.

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Annjenette@reddit

North Carolina is famous for pig farming so yes we are proud of our bacon.

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VegasFoodFace@reddit

Canadian bacon is just ham, in taste that is. Real streaky bacon has a lot more fat and fat is flavor. In fact many people complain their bacon is too fatty and I point them to Canadian or British bacon.

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Trolldad_IRL@reddit

If it’s the same as American bacon then It’s the cooking method. Most “bacon” I’ve had in the UK and Europe is just fried in a pan until it’s not raw any more but still soft and floppy and shriveled up. It needs to be crispy, almost burnt. It should also be thick cut for the best bacon.

If you want it even better, bake it in the oven.

Salt and fat is a winning combination.

I like UK/Ireland style bacon too, but it's not the flavor bomb of good US-style bacon.

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testprimate@reddit

Tell me you haven't been on Reddit for two decades without telling me

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LadySlayinem@reddit

You have to treat bacon like a rare treat though so much fat and salt. But so versatile. We even save the grease and you can buy just the grease here. I don't know about pride though. More like pity for countries that serve their citizens ham and call it bacon.

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bllawless@reddit

If you really like bacon, try some Neuske's bacon. It is the best bacon I've ever tasted by far. We have it here in Wisconsin, but could probably be purchased online. Truly life-changing!

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General_Ad_6617@reddit

I have no idea, but you're right. It is good!