This Underrated Bacon Cut Is Worth Asking For From Your Butcher

If you are like most Americans, bacon is something you grab prepackaged, not something where you bother to ask your butcher about different cuts. Grocery store bacon is Hormel and Oscar Mayer, not a specialty product requiring an expert's touch like steak. But that is a mistake, because getting bacon from a butcher, or even just the butcher counter at a grocery store, has a lot of advantages. For one it is often actually cheaper per pound than prepackaged bacon brands, and you can get as little as you need, cutting down on waste. Butcher counters are also a place where you can discover different types of bacon you might not have known were even an option, and one of the first you should try is the highly underrated slab bacon.

Slab bacon is not a unique style like Canadian bacon. It is just typical American belly bacon that has not been sliced yet. While it will taste the same as normal bacon, coming in a whole slab makes it more versatile as an ingredient than pre-sliced bacon. Sliced bacon is a convenience food, and while most people would consider the saved labor a positive thing, it robs you of many of the ways you can use bacon. Fresh, unsliced deli meats that you get from a butcher's counter also often have fewer preservatives than pre-sliced, pre-packed options. Even though pre-sliced bacon comes sealed in a package, buying anything whole, from meat to cheese, means less oxygen exposure and more flavor.

While slab bacon will be fresher than pre-packed bacon, it's all the things it can be used for that make it worth asking your butcher about. You can certainly cut slices to your exact thickness preference and fry them, but you can also cut them extra thick into steak-like slabs and slow cook your bacon. Slab bacon is also much more easily diced and cubed than sliced bacon, which is great for adding flavor to a ton of dishes, along with crunchy little chunks of delicious salt and fat, much like pancetta is used in a dish like carbonara. Thicker chunks of slab bacon can also hold up to longer cooking without disintegrating in liquids like thinly sliced bacon does.

The best use of slab bacon is to make lardons, which are ideal for adding to pots of beans, soups, and braises. Even thick-cut bacon from a package is usually too thin to make a proper lardon, which are fat little matchsticks of fatty pork. They can be rendered out before other ingredients to add flavor to slow cooked dishes, but they are robust enough that you will still taste the meaty chunks at the end of cooking. Or you can just cut off a hunk from your slab, fry some up, and add them as a topping to salads, pizza, or pasta. Use it a few times and you will quickly find slab bacon becoming a staple of your kitchen.