Like most food lovers, I really love bacon. It is a wonderful, magical product. Salty, smoky, crispy and delicious. Bacon and eggs is by far my favorite breakfast food. I save rendered bacon fat to add that little extra je ne sais quois to other dishes, especially pasta. Bacon elevates other foods, like veggies, from side dishes to star attractions. But it all has to start with good bacon. I grew up on good ol’ Oscar Meyer bacon, which tastes ok, but is really thin and lacks substance. More recently, I had been buying Boar’s Head because it has a better meat to fat ratio. But by far the best I’ve ever had was D’Artagnan’s Wild Boar Bacon which my good friend Eric Arnold gave me to try. But since that was wild boar, I don’t think it’s fair to compare it to regular bacon. Which leads me to today’s great product discovery, Niman Ranch Applewood Smoked Bacon. Readily available from your local Whole Foods supermarket.

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You can see how different this product is as soon as you open the package. It has a beautiful thin layer of golden brown color on the outer edge of the fat that make it look like a naturally smoked pork belly that has just been sliced. Each strip is a little under an inch wide which is pretty narrow compared to most supermarket bacon, but it makes up for it with a much higher meat to fat ratio. It is the perfect thickness for frying, which is to say, not so thick that it won’t crisp up thoroughly, and not so thin that it will turn to dust when you bite into it. The smoke and saltiness are in good balance and over all, I think this is just about as good as supermarket bacon gets. Yes, the picture above is what I consider to be a single serving. And no I don’t know what my cholesterol level is. Shut up.