Bacon #5: Carlton Farms Dry Cured Canadian Style Bacon

July 27th, 2007, 4:46 pm · Post a Comment · posted by jchin

I was shocked when I opened my fifth bacon packet to find Carlton Farms Dry Cured Canadian Style Bacon. Canadian bacon - it’s practically ham! I was disappointed, but cheered up a bit when I thought maybe it would be a pleasant change from the previous greasy bacons.

Carlton Farms is located in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range. Info from accompanying literature:

“Their Canadian bacon comes from the boneless center cut pork loin (”regular” bacon is made from the pork belly). They dry cure the loin with a mixture of salt and sugar for fifteen days and then smoke it over alder and hickory hardwood chips for at least eight hours.”

“Carlton’s Canadian bacon is packed unsliced. John Duyn says that “if you can cut a cube of butter, you can cut a piece of Canadian bacon!”

The “bacon” came in one unsliced hunk. The accompanying recipe was for a breakfast pizza. We weren’t too excited about putting egg on a pizza though, so we decided to make a regular ham/pepper/mozzarella cheese pizza with tomato paste on Boboli crust instead. Sam sliced the Canadian bacon and gently fried it on the stovetop before putting it on the pizza.

The pizza turned out well. It’s pretty fool-proof if you think about it. The Canadian bacon was good, very lean, veering on tough. It wasn’t particularly flavorful. We felt it didn’t add a ton, like we could have used sausage or pepperoni, and the pizza would have probably been better.

We wondered if we overcooked the Canadian bacon. So days later, when I made a quiche with the bacon, I just cut it into cubes and threw it into the pie plate.