Between the Bacon of the Month Club, bacon I enjoy from various butchers and farmer’s markets (here and here and here), and the random bacon I pick up here and there as I’m out and about, it’s pretty rare that I purchase pre-packaged bacon from supermarkets. I realize not everyone has access to premium bacon, and supermarket bacon plays an important role in our economy. But if I’ve learned anything over the last couple years while blogging about bacon, it’s that the quality of the pig definitely makes a difference (as in small producers raise hogs that tend to have better meat and fat qualities compared to factory farm raised hogs whose products are often injected with water and other supplements).
But I’ve got two projects I’m working on this weekend for which I needed bacon with high fat content, and I didn’t really have anything in my freezer that would do the job. So I headed over to my local Safeway store to see what they had to offer.
At first glance, the selection didn’t look so good. They had “hardwood smoked” Oscar Mayer bacon (which I really don’t like the taste of…anytime a bacon is generically referred to as “hardwood smoked,” rather than specifying a particular kind of wood such as hickory, you can pretty much assume it’s going to taste like cardboard). There were also a couple other brands I didn’t recognize (ie generic brand bacon – always risky). But there really just wasn’t much of a selection. And for the particular projects I’m working on, I had my mind set on something maple or hickory smoked.
But all of a sudden, something caught the corner of my eye. A stray package of Hormel Black Label Maple Bacon was hanging out on a shelf with a bunch of Oscar Mayer bacon – clearly it had accidentally wandered into a bad neighborhood. I was kind of skeptical at first since there seemed to be only one package of it in the entire bacon section, and I didn’t see any other Hormel products nearby. But I decided to take a risk on it by rescuing it from a potentially dangerous bacon gang-related situation.
Never having tried this particular Hormel bacon before, and given my self-admitted snobbishness about supermarket bacon, my expectations were pretty low as I began to rip open the package. But then a strange thing happened – when I caught a whiff of the scent emerging from the package, suddenly I was craving pancakes and maple syrup. Hormel is not screwing around by calling this stuff “maple bacon” – it literally smelled like someone had poured an entire bottle of Mrs. Buttersworth’s into the package. My experience tells me that maple-syrup-drenched-bacon isn’t necessarily the most correct approach to creating “maple bacon,” but I didn’t mind the smell at all. This phenomenon might also explain why the packaging says “maple bacon” not “maple smoked bacon.”
I placed the bacon strips in two casserole dishes to bake in the oven at 350 degrees. I chose to use casserole dishes because I needed to collect and preserve as much of the bacon fat as possible for one of the projects I’m working on. After cooking the bacon for about 12 minutes (it’s thin, so it bakes quickly), I removed it from the oven and tasted my first bite. Despite the maple-overload you experience when first opening the package of bacon, the end result doesn’t have an overwhelming maple taste at all – apparently the baking process cooks most of it out, and the initial scent seems to be mostly for show (this would also explain why maple smoked bacon actually tastes sweeter than maple drenched bacon).
I can’t really see myself eating this bacon regularly on its own for breakfast (I learned from visiting the Hormel website that they also “hardwood smoke” their bacon – oh well). But by supermarket standards, this bacon is decent compared to some of the others I’ve encountered, particularly for my purposes today. I needed the bacon for the grease and to crumble into a dessert I’m baking. And for those reasons, Hormel Black Label Maple Bacon will do just fine.