Why Is There No Beef Bacon?

“If bacon is on the menu in the restaurant, it’s coming from a cow,” said Marc Zimmerman, who owns GOZU in San Francisco and is a co-founder of A-Five Meats. Made from beef belly, the navel, for you industry folks, beef bacon is salty, beefy goodness.

Bacon as most of us know it comes from pigs and there’s never really been a reason to question that. Before now, beef bacon has only been available through Halal Butchers (for the most part), although it’s slowly creeping onto your local grocery store shelves.

Although cured beef bacon is delicious in its own right (and still has less fat than pork due to the cut it’s made from), if we’re going to deviate from pork bacon (for other than health reasons), we stand by the idea of uncured vs. cured. We cooked this morning’s meat treat on the stove top, although next time we will be baking it instead.

If you’re old enough to remember the days when french fries were fried in beef tallow, you might recognize the characteristic flavor profile of beef bacon. Use it wherever you’d use bacon: with breakfast, crumbled on salads or baked potatoes, or in sandwiches .

Why Is Bacon Bad For You?

Each ounce of bacon contributes 30 milligrams of cholesterol (not to mention the cholesterol from the eggs that often accompany bacon. Eating foods rich in saturated fats can raise your cholesterol levels, increasing your risk of heart disease and stroke.

The average price for a pound of bacon was $7.10 in August 2021 compared to $6.86 in July, according to data published September 14 by the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows.

The shortage is due to several reasons. One is wild weather caused by climate change, particularly the record cold snap in Texas – a major source of the nation’s chicken meat – that disrupted production and caused prices to skyrocket.

Pork has seen an increase in demand both domestically and export wise, causing the price to jump. “We’ve seen the prices go up, but the price at the farm or ranch level has actually gone down,” Larsen said. … She said that part of the reason they rose the price of their pork is feed costs.

California will start enforcing a proposition voters approved in 2018 at the beginning of next year. Bacon frying on an electric griddle. Thanks to an animal welfare proposition that voters approved overwhelmingly in 2018, bacon and other pork products may be cooked in California at the beginning of next year.

Bacon and eggs may grow harder to find in California. Next year, an animal welfare law takes effect, a proposition passed by voters which mandates more living space for pigs, chickens and veal calves. Producers of eggs and veal say they’ll comply, but most pork producers in Iowa say they can’t.

With the exception of specialty products like turkey bacon that seek to imitate traditional pork bacon, real bacon is made from pork. … Any of these cuts of meat could be sold fresh from the pig simply as pork belly, loin or sides to be cooked or as uncured bacon for people to cure with their own recipe and method.

What is beef bacon?

Back to Top. To understand what beef bacon is, it helps to remember what ordinary bacon is: a slab of pork belly that is cured and smoked and then sliced thinly. Fortunately, cows also have bellies, and that’s where we get beef bacon.

If you’re feeling adventurous or just like making your food from scratch, we’ve provided a quick how-to on making beef bacon at home: Step 1: Cure the beef. A basic dry cure recipe follows: Pink salt is a special curing powder that goes into all kinds of cured meats, including sausages, hot dogs and corned beef.

Beef bacon has less fat to begin with and, because it has a higher melting point than pork fat, it will take longer to render , which means the bacon will spend longer in the pan.

Arrange the bacon slices on a pan, place it in a cold oven, close the door, set the temperature to 400 F and then don’t touch anything for 15 minutes. In fact, this is the best cooking technique for ordinary bacon as well. Getting it right largely depends on how thinly sliced the bacon is. But as long as you cook it slowly you should be fine.

The liquid will seep out: this is a normal part of curing. Remove from the bag, rinse in cold water, dry off and refrigerate one more day, unwrapped and uncovered, so that it’s dry. Step 2: Smoke the beef: Applewood, maple, cherry, or hickory are great choices.

2 tbsp. black pepper. 2 tsp. paprika. 2 tsp. ground coriander. 1 tsp. pink salt. Pink salt is a special curing powder that goes into all kinds of cured meats, including sausages, hot dogs and corned beef. Mix the ingredients together and rub the mixture all over the beef.

Beef belly, sometimes known as the “navel,” is located just below the brisket, in what we might think of as the beef plate or the underside of the short ribs. Chances are you’ll have to order it from your butcher, or online.