Firsthand Hickory Smoked Bacon

When your bacon arrives, you can store it in the refrigerator or the freezer. Once the bacon is opened, it will be good in the fridge for about a week. Unopened bacon in the vacuum-sealed package will keep for about 3 weeks in the fridge and up to 12 months in the freezer, so seize the opportunity to stock up!

Your bacon can take the heat because it’s cured. Curing is a traditional way to preserve meat that pre-dates the invention of refrigeration by several thousand years. Curing keeps meat safe by making it inhospitable to the microbes that would otherwise cause rot. Most commonly, this is done by salting, smoking, and drying.

When cured slowly and traditionally, these techniques not only make the meat safe to keep, they also make it extra delicious.

How does it ship?

In the warmer months (early April to mid September), we ship bacon with two business day service plus warm weather care. Dry ice will evaporate, ice packs may melt, but they will have done their job of preventing the bacon from cooking on its journey. The rest of the year (late September to the end of March), the bacon will ship with our flat rate service (1-4 business days). 

When should I be concerned?

There are some uh-oh signs. If the packaging is puffy or torn, if the color looks grey or un-bacony, or if there are any unusual odors, then that means the bacon might not have survived the trip. Let us know and we’ll make it right!

When you buy a bottle of wine what factors do you consider? I’ll bet one is what grapes it’s made from. We expect that a Cabernet Sauvignon will taste different from a Pinot Noir or a Chardonnay.

How about when you buy a pork chop? Do you consider the breed of the pig? No? You’re not alone. Over the last half a century, the meat industry has selectively bred more and more standardized animals, taking the breed completely out of the consumer’s mind. Pork is pork, right? Well, maybe. The vast majority of the pork that you buy at the grocery today is likely to be a breed developed over the last few decades, so it’s all going to be pretty similar.

The current trend is towards speed over quality.

While we used to breed animals to be disease resistant, or good tempered, or hardy, or delicious, the current trend is toward one very particular trait: the ability to convert feed into meat as quickly as possible.

First, it happened with chicken. In 1925 it took fifteen weeks to grow a chicken that weighed 2.2 pounds. By 1990 you could grow the same chicken in about four weeks. The biggest cost to raising a chicken is the feed so the quicker you can raise a chicken the less feed you have to give it and the less expensive it is to raise. With the new, faster growing chickens, the slow growing chickens that had pecked around farms were economically obsolete. Within a few decades, dozens of centuries-old heritage breed chickens were almost extinct. They were replaced by a few new breeds. Chicken meat became cheap and suddenly the dream of a chicken in every pot became a reality. Well, maybe a McNugget in every bucket.

But there were a lot of tradeoffs. These chickens lost their disease immunity. Wo they started getting daily antibiotics in their feed. They grew too big too quickly for their skeletons to keep up causing them to have trouble moving around without fracturing bones. So they were jam packed into tiny cages that barely allowed them to move. And while the meat was plentiful, it was bland.

After seeing the financial success they had with developing new chickens meat executives turned their attention to pork. Today, commercial pigs grow faster and bigger than ever. Also, like chickens, the vast majority of modern pigs bear little resemblance to the breeds that were rooting around on farms 75 years ago.

Back then, pigs were raised both for their meat and for their fat. Did you know lard was the number one cooking fat in America until World War II? Then, during the war, lard was so important as a grease used in making explosives that advertising campaigns implored housewives to switch to using “more healthful” vegetable fats like margarine so that the lard could all be used in the war effort. Long before the Mediterranean Diet craze put the nail in lard’s coffin it was on its way out. The idea that animal fats were bad caught on. Farmers started breeding pigs to be leaner. The meat industry noticed that lean muscle developed much more quickly than more flavorful fat and that sped the changes along. Within a few decades pork became so lean and that it ended up being advertised as a stand-in for chicken.

The good news is that there are a handful of farmers out there who are still raising heritage breed pigs.

These are the same breeds that could have been raised by their grandparents. Here are a few that you may find on the market today, including Zingerman’s. They do taste different!

Berkshire: one of the most common heritage pigs today, Berkshire pork is tender and incredibly flavorful—you might call it especially “porky.” It’s a popular choice with chefs.

Duroc: first developed in New England around 1800, Duroc pork is earthy, nutty, bold, yet clean and juicy.

Ibérico Pata Negra: these are the famous pigs that root in the forests of southern Spain and eat the acorns to become Ibérico de Bellota. The meat is usually cured. When fresh it’s unbelievably rich and savory, almost like a cross between beef and pork.

Red Wattle: originally from New Orleans, Red Wattle pork has incredibly complex, herbaceous, subtly sweet flavor. Its prized fat melts in your mouth.

Tamworth: first developed in Ireland, and known for being one of the best breeds for bacon. The pork has sweet, nutty notes.