Truth in Advertising

Lucky us, we live in a little town that has two small "Mom and Pop" groceries, both reasonably good. This week, when I stopped in at the Santa Fe Market, they had two different kinds of bacon to add to the Molinari pancetta I already had at home so I bought a few rashers of each to have a taste-off.

The slightly triangular one on the left is the Santa Fe Market's cinnamon apple bacon, an intriguing idea, no? In the middle is the Molinari pancetta, unrolled from its former configuration. On the right is the Santa Fe Market's standard applewood smoked bacon.

Nice, crisp cinnamon apple bacon was tasty and smoky but with no hint of, well, apples or cinnamon. Hmmmm. The pancetta was earthy and meaty-tasting, lots of sultry flavor packed into a small slice and rather peppery - the bacon equivalent of Sophia Loren in a 1950s movie. The applewood smoked bacon was blandly bacon-y with not a whiff of smoky flavor. Flat.

All in all, I'd say Nueske's Applewood Smoked bacon still holds our hearts, not only because it is meaty, smoky and rich but also because tastes like what it professes to be - smoked! Unfortunately, it's made in Wisconsin rather than locally and neither of our little Mom and Pop's sells the Zoomie Station gold standard bacon.