Bacon:

Bacon is the epitome of Breakfast (unless you are a vegetarian). What is bacon? Bacon is cured joints of pork. Well known cuts
are Back and Streaky bacon, there is also Middle Back that includes the streaky and Belly used by the Italians and French for Pancetta - a fatty bacon that goes nice and crispy. Bacon can also be smoked and un-smoked, Dry Cured or Brine Cured.
The whole point of curing and smoking, of course, was to preserve the pork. Now we have fridges we don’t have to preserve
it but we love the taste.

Buying bacon is a lottery at the moment. Supermarkets, in my view, are pulling a lot of wool over our eyes. Bacon should not be cheap! If it is, you should consider how the pig was reared and slaughtered – was the pig a happy free-range pig slaughtered with
the minimum of stress - pigs being a sensitive animal can get very tense if they think they are about to get killed and – I am sorry
to be so frank about this – this toughens up the meat and, in the worst cases, turns the meat bitter. For years Supermarkets have
been selling cheap, intensely farmed Danish or Dutch bacon as British – they can call foreign grown meat British if it is processed (made into bacon) in the UK.

Brine cured bacon (our traditional method of curing bacon), is raw pork immersed in brine – very, very salty, cold water with the addition of some herbs like bay or mace – for up to a week. It produces tender, pink bacon and is best for frying in a little oil.
Brine cured back bacon is not a bacon for going crispy and cooking it well (in the hope of crispiness) will only turn it to leather.
Thinly sliced and well cured streaky, will go crispy. Cheap supermarket bacon will crisp-up, once you have cooked all the water
out and thus, you get half-size bacon and the risk of it being tasteless.

Dry-cured bacon is raw pork meat, rubbed with salts each day and hung up to rid of the juices – to dry the meat. This is done
for up to a week. Dry-cured bacon will go very crispy and has a wonderful flavour. It is tougher than brine-cured and is, therefore, generally sliced very thin. You won’t find little bits of white bubbling off the meat whilst you fry it, as you do when frying
Brine-cured bacon.

Smoked bacon (properly smoked, that is) makes a winter breakfast a masterpiece. Again, the supermarkets have produced
a cheaper version – smoke that is painted on rather than bacon placed in a proper ‘cold’ smoker. Painted on smoke has a
metallic taste, in my view, and seems to repeat on me the whole morning!

The best places to buy bacon in from a traditional butcher or Farm shop. Avoid bacon that has had it’s rind removed.
The machines remove too much of the bacon fat and it is the fat that has the taste and the bit that makes it go crispy -
and because you will not be able to make ‘Fried Worms’ (see recipe below).

From ‘Brunch’ the latest book – see www.brunchbook.com

Fried Worms:

As a child, our greatest treat for a late Sunday Brunch was a huge fry-up accompanied by a handful of Fried Worms on the side. This was mainly because the bacon when I was young was always from the butcher, sliced thick, the bacon had a lot of fat and it was beautifully cured. Now this lovely bacon has come back and it’s fashionable, so we can have fried worms again!