Three Bulls!

The Yngwie Malmsteen of Bacon? The Kuma’s kind of bacon? This bacon is so overkill ____ contest kind of bacon.

We discuss today J. Samuel Whiting Bacon. For our birfday last year we received Grateful Palate’s Bacon of the Month from our fam. They are treasured.

We have not kept up with discussing each bacon with you because the end results have basically been a continuum between tasty BLT and amazing BLT. Also, we knew that we would not even be original as we could merely outsource to a number of better prepared cob loggers on the Bacon of the Month front (more in a minute).

First, let’s see how this suspect bacon is discussed by Grateful Palate:

Sweet aroma, thin and crunchy. Perfect balance like a fine cut diamond. Sweet and powerful, almost fruity. Addictive, soft, lush, judicious use of fat and sublimely balanced. AWESOME and hedonistic. Very unique, sweet, yet savory bacon. Kids love all bacon, but they will especially love this bacon made by J. Samuel Whiting Meats in Pennsylvania.

Hmm, intriguing. Our thoughts in a moment. To the gallery of web log contributors. BEERORKID.com:

It was like xmas when this showed up. The packaging was darn good and two pounds of J. Samuel Whiting Bacon smiled back at me. I had to wait for a special occasion to test it out. Saturday turned out to be a perfect time. It looked pretty awesome and thick. I knew I was gonna be drinking on the beer bus soon so I just did two pieces.

The smell was sweet with a nice smoke aroma, not too much. Cast iron was the only way to go and I slowly cooked it to near crisp. The smoke smell was sweet while cooking. Not much fat rendered out while cooking. It was sticking to my uber seasoned cast iron pan which was odd. I think the sugar and lack of grease caused that.

I paired it with two eggs and some hash browns. It was pretty thick so it was not overly crispy. The flavor was very clean, sweet, with a hint of smoke. It was after taking a bite that the real flavor came out. The aftertaste was awesome. Very impressed.

You Call This A Vacation:

J. Samuel Whiting’s packaging leaves quite a bit to be desired, but their bacon was actually very impressive. According to the Bacon of the Month insert, they placed first at the 2005 Pennsylvania Meat Processor’s Association competition. I have no idea how prestigious this competition is, but I can assure you the award is well-deserved. Thick-sliced and quite lean, the cooked product had great texture and flavor that’s definitely well-suited to be eaten in whole slices. The BLT’s were fantastic, and the bacon was a great complement to the cinnamon french toast we made for breakfast this morning.

This bacon was clearly the best of the recent offerings. I’m going to give it first place (for now), but it’s pretty unfortunate that we can’t do a head-to-head comparison with the previous frontrunner.

We will now offer you our thoughts.

1) We got a bad package. The package was vacuum sealed, and while the seal part was intact, the vacuum was not applied. This means the bacon will have an off taste because of oxidation of the fat.

2) We read the ingredients on the cure. The awesome aftertaste? The extreme savoriness? This bacon featured MSG and a couple kinds of hydrolyzed protein in the cure. The proteins will act like MSG in an unholy trifecta. This bacon would fail a drug test. This bacon was juiced!!!!!

3) Contrary to Grateful Palate’s description on thickness, the bacon was nicely thick. The fat had an interesting quality, and likely the bacon was of such a cure that there would be some rendering of fat but not substantial shrinkage due to excess liquid content. The bacon was cooked on medium heat on a gas burned in a Calphalon pan. The bacon was cooked until done, but without any overdone, deep-fried attributes (the bacon remained chewy with slight crispy bits on the perimeter).

4) The bacon seemed fatty but tasted extremely meaty. Even the fat somehow tasted meaty and perfectly chewy. The bacon was slightly sweet, and the off-notes from the poor packaging were detectable, but something about this bacon said “YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT OFF-NOTES. EAT MORE” This bacon was as close to an unstoppable force of meat product overkill that I could possible imagine. I would love to see an fMRI of my brain while eating this. The savoriness was indeed the most notable attribute and could be directly ascribed to the MSG. Bacon is beloved by my mouth and I have tasted immeasurable amounts of wonderful bacon, and the J. Samuel Whiting experience is likely as close as I have come to feeling like food has mind control. I have been presented the opportunity to shake magic shake on my Korean Fried Chicken (MSG and black pepper) and the result was an inability to stop seasoning the food. I submit to you that this bacon is the Barry Bonds of bacon. It is up to you whether you would like to put it in your tastebud Hall of Fame or Hall of Shame.

5) This bacon, when put in the refrigerator did not get that refrigerator reconfiguration of molecules that makes tomorrow’s cold fridge bacon seem fatty and weird, this bacon was still chewy and wonderful on the flipside. The fat looked like it was there but it didn’t taste like it was there. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that the entire product was bathed in mouth crack?

6) I’m ready to order some more of the abomination.