We love bacon as much as the next omnivore, and we love using it in our cooking even more. A slice or two of slowly-rendered bacon is a great way to start off a soup or a braise. Recently, we've started playing around with a new-to-us version of this beloved pork product: slab bacon. If you cook with a lot of bacon, definitely check this out!
Slab bacon is really just regular bacon before it's been sliced. It's cured and usually smoked, and comes to us in a large, rectangular "slab" with the rind still attached.
This allows us a lot more flexibility with how we cut it and use it. We can cut thick slices of bacon to go on top of casseroles or chunky lardons to round out a soup. The rind can be used to make homemade cracklins!
Since we don't generally use all of it at once, we usually cut it into portions and freeze what we won't use right away. Portions thaw in a few minutes and are ready to go by the time we finish prepping the other ingredients for our meal.
You can usually find slab bacon at any good meat butcher, but we've had better luck buying it from individual farmers at farmers markets. The farmers often have a lot more variety and interesting smoke flavors anyway!
Do you like cooking with slab bacon?
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WANT. I love thick-cut bacon but it's amazingly hard to find. I hope my local farmer's market carries this!!
That's pork belly, right?
yep. cured and smoked pork belly. I thought it was funny on Top Chef when someone took slab bacon and made a pork belly dish and threw Tom for a loop. I believe he may have won the challenge.
If you have trouble finding it, check online for Nueske bacon from Wisconsin. I would imagine you could order a slab. It's not cheap and shipping is probably even uncheaper.
If you are ambitious you can make your own too. Pork bellies come cheap conventionally and it's also easy to get pasture raised bellies too. You can brine it in your fridge or outside if the weather is below 40 F. Then you can smoke it and freeze it.
I think that the standard skinny bacon is pretty underrated. Restaurants like the Publican in Chicago crisp up thick slices of slab bacon for their brunch:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/art_chel/3736326938/
I've seen this at my local Asian market. I bought it once, but was underwhelmed...Clearly it was not smoked or cured.
Thick bacon is so much better than the skinny variety. Especially when done in the oven. So good.
@elizabeth marley,
Pork belly from an Asian market is not bacon, but more like salt pork. Whatever's been done to it is simply for preservation, and not to improve its flavour.
I love slab bacon for lardons and such.
@ elizabeth marley: Asian markets generally stock raw pork belly but I've never seen slab bacon at one. And you don't really use belly and bacon in the same way. But there is something called lap yuk which is a Chinese version of slab bacon. It's often in smallish shrink-wrapped packages near the Chinese preserved sausages.
This is a really good idea. I've always wondered what was meant by slab bacon-now I know.
BEST BACON - which you can get - (by my opinion) -
is: "KOLOZSVARI SMOKED BACON" from Bende's.
We are ordering from them over 10 years.
(they make everything by themselves from scratch,
located North of Chicago, IL)
They DELIVER, too ...
Link:
http://www.bende.com/ecommerce/shopdetails.cfm?p=17&cat=1
... And "LONG TELI SALAMI" is one of the best hard salami you can taste....
Highly recomening,
Alexandra