the Baconer Thick Cut Bacon + Photos

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• Unless you’re friends with a butcher, hunting down less-common bacon cuts is a challenge.
• I like that The Baconer delivers ground bacon, lardons, quarter-pound strips, and more to your door.
• While it’s expensive, The Baconer uses responsibly raised pigs.

I love bacon. I’ve ground it, candied it, read books about it, given it as a gift, made my own, eaten it out of a can, hosted bacon parties, and bought 30 pounds of it at a time. I’m well-informed on the versatility of bacon and disappointed that most lovers of this savory sensation stop at supermarket strips. So, when I learned that The Baconer is bringing uncommon cuts of bacon to the masses, I couldn’t wait to try it out.

What is The Baconer?

In 2016, The Baconer started selling at San Francisco Bay Area farmer’s markets. The company soon expanded to grocery stores and restaurants. And in 2020, it launched its online store, so bacon lovers across the country can enjoy its products.

In addition to selling unique bacon cuts, The Baconer seeks to reconnect people to cooking and traditional ways of using bacon. It does this through virtual, interactive cooking classes and fun recipes.

The Baconer is committed to responsible practices. “We focus on quality: responsible sourcing; working with farms that are raising animals in the right way⁠ — in natural environments, without

antibiotics

, without all the nasty stuff that factory farms do and put into their meat,” said Camilo “The Baconer” Velasquez, who founded the startup with his wife and CEO Elisa Lewis.

Below are my experiences with The Baconer’s products.

Smoked Lardons

Popular in French cooking, lardons are bite-sized bacon chunks. They work well in any recipe that calls for chopped bacon. To test the Smoked Lardons, I made Spaghetti Carbonara using The Baconer’s recipe.

I covered the lardons with water and cooked them in a pan until the water evaporated. Then, I flipped them often as they fried to ensure even cooking. The lardons reached my preferred crispiness quickly and gave the carbonara savory bursts of smoky flavor, more than what you’d get from crumbled or chopped bacon.

Salt & Pepper XXL Bacon Steaks

What’s a bacon steak, you ask? Essentially an extra-thick cut of bacon. We’re talking a quarter-pound for each steak/strip. While you can find butchers who will cut bacon like this for you, I’ve never seen it available in the package.

When cooking regular bacon strips, there isn’t really a middle ground between crispy, dry strips and juicy, chewy strips. Bacon steaks give you the best of both worlds. You cook the steaks until the exterior is crispy (the grill is perfect for this.) The thickness allows the interior to remain juicy and tender.

I used some of my wife’s homemade pepper jelly to make Peanut Butter, Pepper Jelly & Bacon sandwiches with the Salt & Pepper XXL Bacon Steaks. To get the inside chewy and the outside crispy, I baked the steaks for 40 minutes. The recipe was labor-intensive, but the mouthwatering saltiness and crunch of the bacon combined with the sweetness and spiciness of the other ingredients made the effort worth it. The texture of the bacon was like a fried piece of ham but juicy and smoky like grilled wagyu steak.

Ground Bacon

I once ground bacon and mixed it 50/50 with ground beef to make burgers. It was a salty mess. Velasquez recommends using 25% ground bacon to 75% beef when you want to add a level of juiciness and smoky flavor to burgers or almost any recipe that calls for ground meat.

To test The Baconer’s Ground Bacon, I made a gluten-free variation of its Mac and Cheese with Bacon Topping recipe. You break up the ground bacon in the pan as it cooks until it turns into bacon bits. Once broken up, it cooks quickly. Overall, I enjoyed the ground bacon topping, but it overshadowed the rest of the dish. In the future, I’ll try adding modest amounts to burgers and meatloaf.

Smoky Paprika XXL Bacon Steaks

I used the Smoky Paprika XXL Bacon Steaks in my favorite comfort food. Called “cabbage noodles” by my grandma, Haluski is chopped bacon, shredded cabbage, egg noodles, and fennel seeds. Both paprika and Haluski are popular in Hungary, so I figured the flavor profile of the bacon steaks could add a pleasant new dimension to a family favorite.

Since the recipe calls for cooking the cabbage in the bacon grease, I didn’t lose any paprika flavoring. The bacon steaks packed a more flavorful punch than the supermarket bacon strips I usually use. The paprika didn’t throw off the balance of the dish. Instead, it added a new level to it.

Maple Sugar Small Batch Bacon Strips

The Maple Sugar Small Batch Bacon Strips are cut similarly to the thick-cut bacon you’d find at the store. Each slice is about 1.5 ounces. I simply fried them in a pan and scarfed them down. The plan was to eat them while I worked on this piece, but they were gone soon after the photo op. I was concerned that they would be too sweet, but that wasn’t an issue. The subtle maple flavoring doesn’t detract from the savory, smoky bacon. I’d use this bacon in a BLT or alongside pancakes on a Saturday morning.

A con to consider: The Baconer is expensive

The Baconer’s Bacon Lover option is a mixed box with all the products I tested, except it has Smoky Paprika Small Batch Bacon Strips instead of Salt & Pepper XXL Bacon Steaks. It currently costs $125, about $33 per pound. That’s expensive.

When I asked Velasquez and Lewis about this they said that sustainability and quality priorities add to the price, and there aren’t industrial machines that produce the unique cuts they offer, so they need to be hand-cut. “We prioritize quality. We use all responsibly sourced, heritage breed pork, and we partner with companies that prioritize responsible sourcing and pay living wages,” said Lewis.

The Baconer offers some quantity discounts. For example, the Bacon Boss box, basically four Bacon Lover boxes, is about $24 per pound.

The bottom line

Overall, I enjoyed my experience testing The Baconer. I appreciate seeing the broader availability of harder-to-find cuts of bacon. And, I could see myself purchasing the bacon steaks and ground bacon as gifts for the bacon lovers in my life. If you can afford it, I strongly recommend giving The Baconer a try.

Pros: Made from responsibly sourced pigs, offers hard-to-find bacon cuts, outstanding flavor, helpful and creative recipes

Cons: Expensive