My wife, the Velveteen Rabbi, has been taking a course this semester (in her ultimate pursuit of a rabbinic degree) called “Deep Ecuminism”. The aim of the course is to recognize similarities between different faiths and open opportunities for dialogue between those who follow different belief systems.
In that spirit, I’ve been thinking lately about ways Bacontarians can reach out to our brothers and sisters who keep kosher or halal. How can we share our joy in the LARD with those whose forbids them to consume pork?
I think I may have stumbled upon the solution.
Beef bacon, or as we’ve been calling it around our house – bBacon (pronounced “buh-BA-con”.)
It looks like bacon. Certainly more so than turkey bacon or various forms of tofu-related “facon”. The main visual dissimilarity comes out when you try to separate pieces of the raw meat – the fat layer on bBacon is more fragile than on pork bacon, and tends to expand into fat lacework if you pull it too hard.
It cooks like bacon. It cooks slowly, evenly and isn’t prone to scorching, like turkey bacon. It gives off LOTS of fat, if you cook it long enough to get strips good and crunchy. (Conveniently, I’d just cooked a kilo of real bacon before cooking 340g of bBacon. I saved the LARD from the former and the suet from the latter, and the volumes of fat yielded appear to be roughly proportional.)
Observant jews will eat it. No observant Muslims were available for our tests, but Margaret, pictured above, described it as “sinfully delicious, yet halakhically correct”. (No, the Velveteen Rabbi doesn’t keep kosher. She, too, is an observant bacontarian.)
bBacon is described on the package as “cured and smoked beef plate”. Beef plate is also known as “flank” or “hanger” steak, a fatty cut of meat that tastes wonderful when marinated and served as fajitas. The high fat content makes it work as a fried meat – leaner cuts wouldn’t yield sufficient fat to cook properly. The bBacon I tasted was produced by Gwaltney, a proud old Virginia-based ham producer. Smithfield, Virginia, where the company is based, claims to have produced acorn-fed ham since 1627 – Gwaltney has been a going concern since 1870, and is part of Smithfield Foods, the only Fortune 500 company I know of whose web splash page is an attractively spiral-cut ham. In other words, these people understand bacon.
And they evidently understand bBacon as well. The bBacon I tasted was smoky, but not artifically so, pleasantly salty, much less sweet than many bacons, an excellent balance of meat and fat, and, frankly, pretty damned delicious. Given a choice between run-of-the-mill, storebought, presliced bacon and bBacon, I’d likely go with the bBacon, as it cooks more consistently than most cheap bacon I’ve sampled. It’s not quite the religious experience a hand-cut piece of expertly smoked pork bacon is, but it’s not even in the same ballpark as pale imitators like turkey bacon.
Which opens some interesting questions: if it looks like bacon, cooks like bacon, tastes a whole lot like bacon, but is made of cow, not pig… is it bacon? And if so, what does this mean for our faith – nay, for our very way of life?
