There was a great article in the Philly News this week telling the world how the amazing DiBruno Bros is stepping up to add artisan bacon to its truely wondrous food offerings:
For aficionados of Vermont’s singular (but slowly fading) delicacy – cob-smoked hams and bacon – there was “Vermont Smoke and Cure” bacon from South Barre, Vt., thick-sliced, maple-cured, and smoked over, yes, corncobs, conferring subtle hint of sour. (This brand was subtler than some, the meat moistly pink and somewhat akin to Canadian bacon.)
There was Nodine’s out of Connecticut, the double-smoked and bayou-style, but not the juniper, which of course was being touted in the skinny aisles as the best of the lot.
There was bacon from a roadside smokehouse near Nashville, Tenn. A Missouri smoker was in touch.
Chipotle, black-pepper, and cinnamon-rubbed varieties were teed up. Ferguson had procured pricey ($8.99 for three ounces) bars of exceedingly lush, complex Vosges’ “Mo’s Dark [chocolate] Bacon Bar.” He handed out tastes of a sweet-smoky mayonnaise called “Baconnaise.”
Finally, in a prosaic plastic wrapper, one could find thick-cut bacon from Mountain Products Smokehouse, a modest, ranchhouse-sized smoker in LaGrangeville, in the Hudson Valley of New York.
Had you fried up a few slices with your egg Monday morning, you might well have been dumbstruck.
So this is what bacon could be, it might have dawned – its salt and cure so in sync; its smoke woven into the flavor, not simply into the aroma; the chew thoroughly meaty, with little trace of greasiness.
“It is,” ordained Ezekial Ferguson, “the steak of bacon.”
I brought back a bar of that Dark Chocolate Bacon Bar from California, but haven’t tried it yet. But that selection of bacon sounds awesome, and worth a road trip to Philly to stock up.
(h/t to Susan for the article!)
This is a Bacon Bouquet — linked to Delaware Liberal by anon last week in time for Valentines Day. Thanks anon, and my apologies for not getting to bacon blogging last week.
So — what food would you travel for?