49 Fun Facts About Bacon

American-style 'streaky' bacon comes from which part of the pig?

The alternating layers of fat and muscle are what make it crisp; British and Irish cooks generally prefer the leaner back cut.

Which cut does British back bacon include that streaky bacon does not?

A back rasher carries a round of loin meat with a tail of belly attached, giving it that distinctive tadpole shape.

What do Americans call the cured, cooked pork loin cut that Canadians call back bacon?

The name stuck after the product was first shipped from Toronto to New York City.

Ontario's peameal bacon is rolled in what?

The coating was originally ground yellow peas, which gave the product its name; it is wet-cured and left unsmoked.

Guanciale, the Italian cured meat used in carbonara, is made from which part of the pig?

The name comes from guancia, Italian for cheek; it is a speciality of Lazio and Umbria and is never smoked.

Which Italian bacon is a form of belly bacon sold either smoked or unsmoked?

It is often rolled into a tight cylinder and sliced thin, or diced into cubes for soffritto.

Cottage bacon is made from lean meat taken from which part of the pig?

It is usually tied into an oval shape and sliced into rounds, which is why it looks more like ham than rashers.

Which cut is 'collar bacon' taken from?

It is a fattier British cut from the back of the neck, cheaper than back bacon and popular for boiling joints.

What are the two basic ways of preserving pork to make bacon?

Wet curing means injecting or soaking in brine; dry curing means rubbing with salt, which takes longer but loses less water.

Which additives in bacon brine speed up curing and stabilise the pink colour?

The nitrite breaks down into nitric oxide, which binds to the iron in myoglobin and fixes the colour; it also stops botulism.

Curing salt is dyed pink to stop it being mistaken for table salt. What is it commonly called?

It is ordinary sodium chloride blended with sodium nitrite; the pink is a warning, not the source of the meat's colour.

Under USDA rules, bacon cured with nitrites from celery or beets must be labelled how?

The regulation only recognises synthetic nitrites as a 'cure', so the 'uncured' packet often contains just as much nitrite as the regular one.

Smoking bacon can take up to how long?

American producers favour hickory, mesquite or applewood; the length depends on how intense a flavour is wanted.

What is the unsmoked kind called in Britain?

The name refers to its uncooked, unsmoked state rather than its colour, though the fat is paler than on smoked rashers.

Roughly what share of bacon is sold as rashers?

The rest goes out as slab bacon, lardons, joints and diced pieces for cooking.

What does the Proto-Germanic root of the word 'bacon' mean?

In Middle English 'bacoun' meant any pork at all; the modern narrow sense came later.

In which county did John Harris open the world's first bacon processing plant in the 1770s?

The Calne factory gave its name to the Wiltshire cure, a mild brine method still used across Britain.

The Dunmow Flitch Trials award a side of bacon to couples who can prove what?

The custom is traced to 1104 and Little Dunmow Priory, and Chaucer alludes to it in The Wife of Bath's Prologue.

Who sits on the jury at the modern Dunmow Flitch Trials?

Winning couples are carried shoulder-high in the ancient Flitch Chair; losers walk behind the empty chair with a consolation gammon.

Since the Second World War, how often have the Dunmow Flitch Trials been held?

The custom was revived in 1855 after Harrison Ainsworth's novel The Custom of Dunmow, and settled into its four-year rhythm after the Second World War.

'Macon', introduced across Britain during wartime rationing, is bacon-style cured meat made from what?

It was historically a Scottish product, and by most accounts nobody missed it when the war ended.

Vegetarian bacon is usually made from marinated strips of textured soy protein or which fermented food?

The product goes by 'facon', 'veggie bacon' or 'vacon', and none of the names has caught on.

How are commercial bacon bits typically cooked?

Imitation bits are made from textured vegetable protein with artificial flavouring, which is why so many salad-bar toppings are technically vegan.

By roughly what percentage does regular processed-meat consumption raise colorectal cancer risk, per WHO's 2015 finding?

The IARC placed processed meat in its highest evidence category, alongside tobacco, though the absolute risk increase is far smaller.

How many calories are in a teaspoon of bacon grease?

Rendered bacon fat was saved in tins for cooking and, during the Second World War, collected to make glycerine for explosives.

Which parasitic roundworm was the traditional reason bacon had to be treated or thoroughly cooked?

Trichinosis in commercial pork is now vanishingly rare in most developed countries thanks to feed rules and freezing.

In a Smithfield survey, what share of Americans said they would support bacon as the 'national food'?

US bacon sales climbed 9.5 percent in 2013 to an all-time high of nearly $4 billion.

The Bacon Explosion, an internet-famous barbecue dish, is bacon wrapped around what?

Two pounds of woven bacon around two pounds of sausage; it was created by the BBQ Addicts blog and went viral in 2008.

Which fast-food chain introduced the Baconator in 2007?

Two quarter-pound patties, two slices of cheese and six strips of bacon; a Son of Baconator with smaller patties followed.

How many strips of bacon are on a Baconator?

The full-size double comes to about 930 calories, before fries.

Which celebrity chef has endorsed a 'Bacon of the Month' club?

The subscription mails a different artisan bacon each month; Sara Perry's 2002 cookbook Everything Tastes Better with Bacon fed the same appetite.

Bacon ice cream started as a joke on which British comedy show?

A New York parlour finally made it for real as an April Fools' stunt in 1992, giving away 15 gallons.

Which high-protein eating plan is credited with helping launch American bacon mania in the late 1990s?

High-protein eating rehabilitated a food that low-fat orthodoxy had spent two decades demonising.

International Bacon Day was established by a group of graduate students in which city?

It falls on the Saturday before Labor Day; Des Moines' Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival sold 8,000 tickets in three minutes in 2013.

A 2007 Leeds University study of 700 variants concluded the perfect version of the butty needs what?

The sandwich is known as a butty, bap, cob or sarnie depending where in Britain you order it, and is anecdotally a hangover cure.

In a survey of British butty condiment preferences, which one narrowly beat ketchup?

Food writer Felicity Cloake, unimpressed with both, recommends marmalade and mustard instead.

Which country's cooks most commonly sell "middle bacon", combining the eye of the loin with a tail of streaky?

In Japan, by contrast, bacon means smoked belly as in the US, sold in regular or half-length packs.

What is a whole unsliced side called?

Buying it whole lets cooks cut thick lardons, the little batons that go into coq au vin and salade lyonnaise.

Which German-language word for cured pork fat overlaps in meaning with 'bacon'?

In Austria and South Tyrol the word means a juniper-smoked, dry-cured ham; in northern Germany it can mean plain back fat.

Once brined in the same barrel as bacon, ham is now defined as meat from which part of the pig?

Ham brine also carries more sugar; bacon stays less sweet even when brown sugar or maple syrup is added for flavour.

Which flavouring is often added to the cure when making bacon in Canada?

Canadian-style back bacon is a lean cut from the eye of the loin, but in Canada itself the plain word 'bacon' usually means side bacon.

Griebenschmalz, a popular spread made from bacon lard, comes from which country?

Small bacon cubes called Grieben are a staple of southern German cooking, and are now sold ready-made in shops as 'Baconwürfel'.

In Middle English, what did the word 'bacon' (or 'bacoun') refer to?

Before the Industrial Revolution the product was made on local farms and in home kitchens rather than in factories.

Besides wood, which two unusual fuels can be used to smoke bacon for a different flavour?

Smoking can take up to eighteen hours depending on how strong a flavour is wanted.

Tatws Pum Munud, a traditional stew of potatoes, vegetables and smoked bacon, comes from where?

The name translates as 'five-minute potatoes', though the dish takes rather longer than that to cook.

Which of these is added to bacon to greatly reduce the formation of nitrosamines?

It is usually added as ascorbate or sodium erythorbate; vitamin E helps too, while frying at lower temperatures also keeps nitrosamine levels down.

John Harris opened the world's first commercial bacon plant in the 1770s in which English town?

The Harris family business dominated the town for two centuries, and the Wiltshire cure of bacon takes its name from the county.

Which 1824 book, among the earliest American cookbooks, assumed bacon is always smoked?

Its only advice on the process is to make sure the fire does not get too hot; it says nothing at all about flavouring the smoke.

Which 1708 satirical poem complains that nearly all colonial American food was bacon-infused?

Ebenezer Cooke's poem lent its name to John Barth's 1960 novel; 'sot-weed' was slang for tobacco.