In a few weeks, we're having some friends over for a champagne brunch with homemade sourdough pancakes--and maybe homemade fruit syrup (I'm working on that one), and I thought it would be nice to serve bacon as well. We try to eat pretty healthy, so we don't generally eat it, but AGAIN having read the Little House On the Prairie series (but not at the time actually understanding its importance as a culinary guide), I knew that bacon is basically cuts of rather fatty meats smoked, cured, or both. That sounds simple enough.
It isn't.
As of yet, I haven't been brave enough to take a notebook with me while grocery shopping for fear of looking stranger than I do reading the labels of 34 brands of bacon, or of getting thrown out of the store for being some sort of produce-related industrial spy, so I can't actually tell you all the ingredients in bacon, but so far they all have about 3 different sodium "somethings" in them and none of them sounded like "salt."
Next week's reading: breakfast sausage labels. Heaven help me!
2 comments:
Falls Brand
Thick sliced bacon in the "stack
pack" from Winco. Good stuff.
Ingredients: cured with Water, Salt, Sodium Phosphates, Sugar, Brown Sugar, Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Nitrite, Flavorings.
I'm sure a Spounge Bob quote is appropriate here.
I'm loving this experiment of yours! I really am.
It might be worth bearing in mind that some of those ingredients *may* be legal, even if you don't know what they are. Example? OK. I definitely remember, in one of the Little House On The Prarie books (I think 'On the shore of silver lake'; yes, I was a major addict, why do you ask?), that they had bacon or fat pork, which used saltpeter as one of the pickling salts. Well, that's potassium nitrate. Sodium nitrate and nitrite are now used more commonly, because they are better at preventing bacterial spoilage of foods. Just 'cause it's a chemical doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't have been used 100 years ago. ;) Good for you, though? Another question.
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