Bacon is a type of salt-cured pork made from various cuts, typically the belly or less fatty parts of the back. It is eaten as a side dish, used as a central ingredient, or as a flavouring or accent.
Pancetta is a salt-cured pork belly meat, product in a category known as salume. In Italy, it is often used to add depth to soups and pastas.
A lardon, also spelled lardoon, is a small strip or cube of fatty bacon, or pork fat, used in a wide variety of cuisines to flavor savory food and salads. In French cuisine, lardons are also used for larding, by threading them with a needle into meats that are to be braised or roasted. Lardons are not normally smoked, and they are made from pork that has been cured with salt.
Heston Marc Blumenthal is a British celebrity chef, TV personality and food writer. Blumenthal is regarded as a pioneer of multi-sensory cooking, food pairing and flavour encapsulation. He came to public attention with unusual recipes, such as bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge. His recipes for triple-cooked chips and soft-centred Scotch eggs have been widely imitated. He has advocated a scientific approach to cooking, for which he has been awarded honorary degrees from the universities of Reading, Bristol and London and made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Gribenes or grieven is a dish consisting of crisp chicken or goose skin cracklings with fried onions.
Curing salt is used in meat processing to generate a pinkish shade and to extend shelf life. It is both a color agent and a means to facilitate food preservation as it prevents or slows spoilage by bacteria or fungus. Curing salts are generally a mixture of sodium chloride and sodium nitrite, and are used for pickling meats as part of the process to make sausage or cured meat such as ham, bacon, pastrami, corned beef, etc. Though it has been suggested that the reason for using nitrite-containing curing salt is to prevent botulism, a 2018 study by the British Meat Producers Association determined that legally permitted levels of nitrite have no effect on the growth of the Clostridium botulinum bacteria that causes botulism, in line with the UK's Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Food opinion that nitrites are not required to prevent C. botulinum growth and extend shelf life..
Tocino is bacon in Spanish, typically made from the pork belly and often formed into cubes in Spain. In Caribbean countries, such as Puerto Rico and Cuba, tocino is made from pork fatback and is neither cured nor smoked but simply fried until very crunchy; it is then added to recipes, much like the way lardons are used in French cuisine. In the Philippines, tocino refers to sweetened and cured pork belly.
Bacon mania is passionate enthusiasm for bacon in the United States and Canada. Novelty bacon dishes and other bacon-related items have been popularized rapidly via the internet.
The peanut butter and banana sandwich (PB&B), or peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich (PB,B&B), sometimes referred to as an Elvis sandwich, the Velvet Elvis, or simply the Elvis, is a sandwich with toasted bread, peanut butter, sliced or mashed banana, and occasionally bacon. Honey or jelly is seen in some variations of the sandwich. The sandwich is frequently cooked in a pan or on a griddle.
Seduced by Bacon: Recipes & Lore about America's Favorite Indulgence is a cookbook about bacon written by Joanna Pruess with her husband Bob Lape. It was first published by The Lyons Press in 2006 and contains 90 recipes using bacon for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and even desserts.
Salt pork is salt-cured pork. It is usually prepared from pork belly, or, more rarely, fatback. Salt pork typically resembles uncut side bacon, but is fattier, being made from the lowest part of the belly, and saltier, as the cure is stronger and performed for longer, and never smoked. The fat on the meat is necessary for the curing process as it allows the salt to soak in and preserve the meat. Salt pork is made by layering salt and thin layers of meat, then dousing it in a brine mixture once the desired size has been reached.
Everything Tastes Better with Bacon: 70 Fabulous Recipes for Every Meal of the Day is a book about cooking with bacon written by Sara Perry. She is an author, food commentator and columnist for The Oregonian. The book was published in the United States on May 1, 2002, by Chronicle Books, and in a French language edition in 2004 by Les Éditions de l'Homme in Montreal. In it, Perry describes her original concept of recipes combining sugar and bacon. Her book includes recipes for bacon-flavored dishes and desserts.
Vegetarian bacon, also referred to as veggie bacon, vegan bacon, vegan rashers, vacon, or facon, is a plant-based version of bacon.
The Bacon Cookbook: More than 150 Recipes from Around the World for Everyone's Favorite Food is a cookbook on bacon by James Villas. It was published by Wiley in 2007. Villas is a former food editor for Town & Country magazine, and The Bacon Cookbook is his 15th book on food. He notes on the book's jacket that he was "beguiled by bacon since he was a boy." He describes the appeal of bacon in the book's preface, and in the introduction recounts the history of the product, as well as its variations from different locations internationally. Chapters are structured by type of recipe and food course, and in total the book includes 168 recipes.
I Love Bacon! is a cookbook with over fifty recipes devoted to bacon and bacon dishes, many of them from celebrity chefs. The book was written by Jayne Rockmill and photography was provided by Ben Fink. Broken down into eight sections, the book covered how to make homemade bacon and moves onto "brunch" and "small bites" before covering soups, salads and sides, pasta, fish, meat, and desserts. I Love Bacon! was published in October 2010 by Andrews McMeel Publishing and met with favorable reviews for its unique dishes and helpful culinary tips for novices.
Bacon ice cream is an ice cream generally created by adding bacon to egg custard and freezing the mixture. The concept of bacon ice cream originated in a 1973 sketch on the British comedy series The Two Ronnies as a joke; it was eventually created for April Fools' Day by a New York ice cream parlour in 1982. In the 2000s, the English chef Heston Blumenthal experimented with ice cream, making a custard similar to scrambled eggs and adding bacon to create one of his signature dishes. It now appears on dessert menus in other restaurants.
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing is a 2005 book by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn about using the process of charcuterie to cure various meats, including bacon, pastrami, and sausage. The book received extremely positive reviews from numerous food critics and newspapers, causing national attention to be brought to the method of charcuterie. Because of the high amount of interest, copies of the book sold out for a period of a few months at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating is a 2004 book by Fergus Henderson that deals with how to cook every part of a pig, including parts rarely used in western cuisine, such as offal. It was originally released as Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking in England in 1999, but was updated and revamped to be more comprehensive for the American edition, which was also re-released in the UK. The updated release featured a foreword written by Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential.
How to Cheat at Cooking is a cookbook by television chef Delia Smith, published in 2008 by Ebury Publishing. It was her first book following her How To Cook series, and had a television series based on the same recipes on BBC Two. Following publication, Smith was criticised by other chefs due to the use of certain ingredients such as canned minced lamb, and by nutritionists because of the level of salt in some of the recipes. The book increased the sales of several products, described as the "Delia Effect", and has been credited with an increase in the sales of tinned meat over the following two years.
