Bacon - Australian is not British
"The bacon I've tried from the supermarket is unlike anything I saw in the UK. The bacon appears to be cooked (not just cured or smoked like UK bacon), and it comes in horrible vacuum packs that as well as bacon also seem to contain some kind of gelatinous goo!"
A comment on Poms in Oz
Too right say I but I long ago gave up the search for something approximating what I thought English bacon was like and so I just buy it in packets as described. And I buy the economy bacon because it doesn't actually look any worse than the more expensive packets of middle bacon or streaky bacon, or even that sold loose in the deli.
Mind you it is now so long ago that I have eaten English bacon that I no longer know whether I just have some nostalgic view of what bacon was like back there in the British Isles. However, I have to say that I find it almost impossible to make Australian bacon crispy. It always seems to almost steam rather than fry even when I have the heat turned up high and risk burning my frying pans.
The other thing that happens is that I store it in the meat compartment at the bottom of my fridge and once I have opened the packet, used some bacon and replaced the remainder back in the packet, expelling as much air as I can, something in there turns to ice, and the bacon itself almost freezes as well as having ice crystals form on the surface. Which also makes it damp. I have tried blotting it with paper towels but nothing seems to make any difference. This problem is most likely one of my own making though. I've probably got the fridge at too low a temperature. And it's not easy to find what temperature you should have, even though you can adjust the temperature. The instruction manual does not make any recommendations.
Two things brought on this pondering on the difference. The first is that I have decided to remake Jill Dupleix's chicken caesar salad tonight )it's very hot) and this needs bacon. She tells you to cook it in the oven but today is very hot and I'm not really allowed to turn the oven on - it heats up the house! Which is why I have cheated and bought a ready cooked chicken. So I shall fry the bacon instead. I might take it out of the fridge beforehand to melt the ice crystals. Although this is a new packet and it may not be necessary. And I'll blot it with the paper towels too.
The second is a combination of two related things. The first is my sister asking about how to find bacon which is more like English bacon than what I have, as her son, who will be arriving shortly for the big wedding in February, likes bacon for his breakfast. The full English breakfast in fact. Not sure who's going to cook that for him! The second thing was seeing in Coles today some bacon which claimed to be British from the British Sausage, Ham and Bacon Co. And it did look a bit different. It looks darker. More like pancetta, which is another thing again.
So I looked the company up on the internet and found that they are indeed, The British Sausage, Ham and Bacon Co. It's a West Australian company founded by an English immigrant butcher in 1991 responding to fellow poms whingeing about Australian sausages. He started with sausages and later moved on to the ham and the bacon. Not sure poms can genuinely complain about the sausages anymore, and probably not the ham either, but the bacon - well it's still not the same. As my top of the page quote states, it somehow looks cooked. So I should probably try the 'British' bacon some time in spite of the greater cost. Indeed I must get over this economy thing. Well some of the time anyway.
I could of course buy bacon loose in the deli, or at the Queen Vic market, But I'm not really convinced that it looks any different to what you get in the packet. You might just be missing the goo - which is presumably some kind of preservative. Here is a picture from Aldi of their bacon - which comes out of a packet, but which they have obviously prettied up - or photographed before it went into the packet.
I did investigate on the internet, and it seems the difference probably lies in the way it is cured, though nobody seemed to be sure enough to leave out that word 'probably'. They suggested that British bacon is wet cured in a brine and the Australian bacon is dry cured in salt. Then I think they are both smoked. But honestly nobody seemed game to come out with a definite difference in the way the meat was treated. There seemed to be more emphasis on different cuts of meat than different methods. And really the cuts are mostly from the same part of the animal, just cut differently.
So here you have British on the left and Australian on the right. And I have to say the British looks better here - but again, it might all be down to the photographer.
Having more or less decided that the difference lay in the wet and the dry curing, I then found a picture of Morrison's (British) bacon proudly saying that their bacon was dry cured. So go figure.
The British Sausage, Ham and Bacon Co. though, implies that Australian ham is actually cooked:
"The secret to this beautiful bacon is that it is raw cured and not cooked which allows the natural sweetness of the pork and the special cure time to mature, so the bacon develops a superior flavour and satisfying meaty bite. Taste the difference." British Sausage, Ham and Bacon Co."
And the commentator on Poms in Oz certainly thought our bacon looked cooked. Me I'm not so sure. Depends what you call cooked. The packet I have at the moment, which is not an economy one this time, says that it is smoked. So it just looks a bit like ham really.
So I'll give it another go, another attempt to get my bacon crispy. I guess, awful thought, it could just be my cooking!
