The Annals of Bacon Research

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Issue 5: Smoked Bacon The idea of smoked bacon may puzzle a few of you - after all, you ask, isn't bacon already smoked? Why yes, yes it is, but it isn't fully cooked in a smoker, and that's what I set out to do. I was already smoking a few pounds of delicious pork shoulder for some sandwiches, and it seemed like a good opportunity to try smoking a few other things. After digging through my pantry and rejecting a number of things (peanut butter, crackers, flour, carrots, ...) I stumbled upon the big winner - bacon! Why wouldn't bacon cooked in a smoker be delicious? Sure, it probably won't be crispy like bacon fresh from a frying pan, but at least it'll retain all of it's bacon-y goodness (unlike boiled bacon); plus, it'll gain more delicious smoke flavor. Luckily this theory seemed fairly easy to test - I just needed to put some strip of bacon in my smoker and check on it occasionally. Raw bacon in smoker Detail of bacon After about 20 minutes the bacon began to looking like it was starting to cook - it had just started to obtain the translucent look of warm bacon. Partially smoked bacon After about 45 minutes in the smoker, I decided it was done. It was a beautiful deep brown color from the smoke, though it was still fairly floppy. Also, not as much fat had rendered out as it would have had it been fried. Smoked bacon Of course, the best part of any experiment involving bacon isn't looking at it, but tasting it, and this bacon was quite tasty. In fact, a scientific three out of three taster rated it very tasty. It was still pleasantly salty, but had intense smoke flavor. The texture was a bit off, which wasn't unexpected since it wasn't fried, but not so bad as to make it un-enjoyable. Overall, the result was a marked improvement over what this brand of bacon normally tastes like - it was on sale at my local grocer, and I'm unable to resist sale priced bacon. Detail of smoked bacon After such good results with double smoking the bacon in this manner, it would be interesting to do some further research with frying the bacon and then smoking it. This may help add some of the positive qualities of fried bacon, and retain some of the extra-smoke deliciousness. This will add the danger of ending up with very dry bacon from the double cooking, but I think we at ABR are up to the challenge.

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