Meat Experts Blind Taste Test Every Bacon

[Voice-Over] We've gathered three meat purveyors

to blind taste test every brand of bacon

we could get our hands on

to see which ones meet their standards.

[grandiose music]

All bacon was prepared according to the instructions

on their packaging.

Oscar Mayer, Original.

Color is good. Pretty glistening,

which is great.

Means some of the fat is like rendered out,

but not too much.

Smells pretty sweet. Pretty sweet.

When I'm eating bacon,

it's got to have a balanced flavor

between the saltiness, the sweetness, the smokiness.

The salt is, like, carrying it,

but the sweetness from the sugar

is also making it just, like, very unctuous

and, like, rounding it out.

I'm also looking for a satisfying texture.

I want, like, a thick-cut bacon

where you can really taste that complexity to it.

I do want some, like, crispy edge,

and I do still want to be able to bite into the fat

and have it almost, like, pop in your mouth.

Fat-to-meat ratio is really important.

Fat is essential to it.

I'm usually looking for around a 60% fat, 40% meat.

When you cook bacon,

obviously, a lot of that fat is going to render,

so you want a higher fat ratio

because you're gonna lose some of that

in your cooking time.

This is pretty good. It's fairly balanced.

The smoke does taste natural,

but it's a very quick smoke, for sure.

Texture's great.

It's crispy, but it has a little bit of chew.

The fat is still kind of, like, popping a little bit.

Pretty high in fat to me.

It looks cured because I can see the pink color.

One of the things that curing does

is it keeps that like nice pink hue.

Otherwise, this would just be a flat gray palette.

It also keeps you from getting botulism.

Every single bacon is cured, even it says uncured.

This is probably sold as a slightly premium style,

big box store bacon.

I have a feeling. All right, what do we got?

Oh my God, is that what I'm eating right now?

Naturally hardwood smoked Oscar Meyer.

They have the Oscar Mayer Mobile.

It's pretty good.

Cured with water, so that's a wet cure.

There's two basic ways to cure.

Wet curing is normally just called brining.

Oldest school way for me is dry curing.

These are techniques that we've been doing

for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

In some cases, thousands.

And it has the sodium nitrite.

That's why you're seeing the pink color.

This is a good bacon.

I'd be completely fine having this on my bodega bacon,

egg, and cheese sandwich.

I'm gonna keep eating it.

[Voice-Over] Boar's Head, Naturally Smoked.

If you told a kid to draw a piece of bacon

in like the fifth grade, this is 1000% what would happen.

Got this fat line up top and that meat down below.

When we talk about ideal ratios, this is pretty good.

The flavor is balanced.

It's coming off as like a little chewier.

Very, very, very low lean meat on this guy.

It's mostly fat.

It was really, really thin,

so it doesn't have a lot of that texture,

which I think is kind of like robbing the fat

of the experience I want.

You could tell that like,

there wasn't a lot of muscle work.

There wasn't a lot of flavor developed.

My guess is this was created in record, record time.

I don't know.

What's a bad one?

Smithfield?

Oh, come on, it's Boar's Head.

They're usually the highest price per pound

in like regular supermarkets.

It's too thin.

It's not really smoked that well.

Naturally smoked.

They must've been naturally smoking something,

that's for sure.

When you're smoking, you're achieving taste, smell.

You can transform the protein itself by cooking it,

and you're changing the color.

They're trying to tell the customer

that they don't use liquid smoke.

Sodium nitrate is the most commonly used curing agent.

It's called pink salt because it's actually pink.

It's not naturally occurring as pink,

but it's colored pink deliberately

so you don't confuse it with regular salt.

because if you did, you would get sick.

It's a naturally occurring salt

that they found actually just kept meat pink.

The sodium nitrite is what's gonna be most quickly active.

Allows you, one, to be able to cook

at a lower temperature while keeping it safe

for consumption, and it keeps that nice pink hue.

And you get suckered into buying another pack of Boar's Head

'cause it looks so pretty.

This is a bad bacon.

[Voice-Over] Peter Luger, Extra Thick Cut.

Feels like a little bit of a thicker cut.

It's like three of the Boar's Head slices put together.

You can see the side of the belly on this one.

Already, I can tell you,

this is probably gonna be my favorite.

I don't like it.

It's like a weird sweetness that just tastes off.

We were so close to having a good bacon here.

Texture is great.

You gotta make it work to like break it apart.

It has a little more thickness to it.

The thicker it is,

the more I'm going to be able to taste those flavors.

It's got a chewier texture.

It's in my mouth longer.

Fat to meat ratio is pretty good.

In the meat world, we always say like fat is flavor.

If there's anything that these animals are eating,

that nuance is not going into the muscle itself.

It's going into the fat.

This is definitely marketed

as the expensive premium bacon.

Peter Luger. Peter Luger.

I know they do a thick cut bacon, but I've never had it.

My God. Peter Luger, nailed it.

They're gonna kill me.

Peter Luger's is a steak house.

It's in Brooklyn.

They're known for slabs of bacon.

You're buying is just a side, side of bacon.

They're not making this themselves.

This is co-packed in a big factory.

I'm sorry to say,

I don't think they're doing a good job with this.

With ingredient lists,

the order they're in is telling you the greatest percentage.

Obviously pork is gonna be number one.

The number two I would like to see is salt.

But the number two on this is water.

That means one, it's wet brined.

It doesn't say smoked.

Maybe they are confident in the fact that like,

they don't need the smoke.

Maybe that was traditionally how they did it.

I love the texture.

I love that it is thick cut.

The flavor, something's off, man.

Something's off.

This could be better.

[Voice-Over] Applegate Naturals, Sunday Bacon.

This is the thinnest slice that I've seen at this point.

Not a good sign.

I swear to God, I'm actually holding up

a slice of bacon right now.

you might not be able to see it.

That's probably 70% fat.

That's a lot of fat.

But it's gonna be almost completely rendered

'cause it's so thin.

I would call this buffet bacon.

This would be a really good example of a horrible bacon.

It's very unbalanced flavor.

There's saltiness, there's not a lot of sweetness.

There's no smoke, there's no real flavor.

Texture's not great, it's just like falling apart.

There's this kind of like grittiness.

It's like eating dirt.

It's really salty.

I would say after like two slices,

you'd be like, I need something to drink.

The smell is off-putting to me.

This really small amount of lean meat,

it's gonna cure so fast.

And that's what's definitely happened here.

This is a low tier bacon.

Oh my God, Applegate.

This is supposed to be the good one?

Come on, are you serious?

You're telling me that I like Oscar Mayer Wiener bacon

more than Applegate?

[Patrick] It's uncured Sunday bacon.

Apparently Sunday bacon sucks.

Somebody must've had really bad Sundays

for that to be their Sunday bacon.

So this is saying it's uncured bacon,

but that is false.

It is cured bacon.

If it's bacon, it's cured.

If it's not cured,

well, you got a piece of roast pork belly.

It means that they're using cultured celery powder-

Which has more parts per million of sodium nitrite

than actual sodium nitrite,

is doing the exact same thing.

It's just a way to not use sodium nitrite

and not have what reads as like a chemical

in your ingredients list,

because we all know celery is natural,

but it still performs the same function.

There's no legality around saying uncured like that.

Cane sugar, now sugar's cool again if we say cane.

This is just like very buzzword forward-

No antibiotics ever,

which you're gonna see on a lot of packages.

And by the way,

they're not legally allowed to add antibiotics.

That just means they're following the law.

Without the packaging, I didn't like it.

And with the packaging, I don't like it even more.

This is one of the more like premium.

And by premium, I mean expensive bacons on the market.

I would have expected better.

Better off being Oscar Mayer than this.

And I shouldn't be saying that as a chef.

[Voice-Over] Jimmy Dean Applewood Smoked.

Classic piece of bacon.

It's a little thin for my liking.

So there's not gonna be a lot of texture going on,

but I like the ridges,

which means it shrank somewhat

because of the, there was good fat in it.

When it gets all like squiggly, there was a lot of fat

and obviously that gets melted

and it kind of compresses the proteins and the fat together.

I'm not smelling any smoke.

I'm not smelling a lot of complexity of flavor.

I sound like a diva right now.

It's not very good, but it's well balanced.

It's a salty bacon.

Tiny bit of smoke in there.

The fat doesn't have any pop to it

because again, it's so thin,

it's all been like basically cooked out.

It's chewy.

It's not as crispy as I would think it would be

for like the thinness that it is.

It's a little more fatty for my liking.

Is this Jimmy Dean?

That's my boy Jimmy.

Yep. Oh, Jimmy Dean.

Jimmy baby!

Growing up in Texas, I would associate Jimmy Dean

with like growing up in breakfast

more than I would like Oscar Mayer.

They're owned by Hillshire

and who owns Hillshire? Tyson Foods.

With the J and the cowboy boot, come on.

That makes me feel at home.

Applewood smoked.

I like that they tell you what kind of wood they use.

You see more like hickory smoked and applewood smoked.

Applewood is gonna be a lot more milder.

I think it's marketing at the end of the day.

I don't think that the average consumer

is gonna tell the difference.

It's either a smoky feeling or it's not.

In a world full of bad, big corporate bacons,

this one's not terrible.

This is my American classic.

Wish it was thicker.

Wish I enjoyed it more, but I still just love Jimmy Dean's.

[Voice-Over] 365 by Whole Foods, Uncured Center Cut.

I'm seeing layers of, you know, these fat bands in this.

That shows a more complex piece of meat for me.

It cooked flatter, which just looks better.

You can tell it's a little bit thicker cut for sure.

It's got nice color to it.

Guys, we have a good bacon.

It's a little salty, but I don't mind that.

Bacon should be a little salty.

Salt's great.

Sugar's good.

I wish it had a little more smoke on it.

It's slightly thicker than the last couple we've tried.

So it has a little bit of texture.

It has a little bit of crunch, which I like.

It's somewhat of the standard

of what the meat to fat ratio would be.

I could eat this bacon.

This is pretty good bacon, guys.

365, god damn it.

Amazon bacon.

365, it's the Whole Foods brand.

I buy this bacon all the time.

This is the one my kids love.

Uncured center cut, smokehouse bacon.

Center cut is just like the center of the pork belly.

Who cares if it's center cut?

It's a little bit of a marking ploy.

The whole belly's delicious.

Don't buy into the hype, just enjoy the bacon.

We got water, sea salt, cane sugar.

They try to make it seem like it's better for you

because it's sea salt versus just salt.

Or that like instead of sugar, it's raw cane sugar.

It is uncured.

No nitrates or nitrites added.

Except for naturally occurring nitrates in sea salt.

So wow, wow, wow, you can be no preservative free

and just have salt on the back and you guess what?

You still are curing it and getting that nice pink color.

When you look at this bacon,

you're looking at a bacon that is more just like raw pork.

Light or like rose pink versus the more pronounced

like cured, almost like red pink.

This is a first appearance of this label that we're seeing.

Animal welfare certified, that's not a buzzword.

It's a legal description that these hogs were raised

in accordance with that law.

It basically has to do with the perceived stress

of the animals by way of like travel

to the slaughterhouse from the farm

and also as they're being raised.

I'll hand it to them.

They're putting their money where their mouth is,

at least to some aspects here.

Way to go. This one was a good one.

[Voice-Over] Market Pantry Hardwood Smoked Classic Cut.

It's a little thin, it's a little crispy looking.

It looks like jerky.

The fats aren't really present.

Some drier, dark spots.

This is breaking apart very easily.

Also look at the color on the fat.

Almost like a yellowish brown.

This is not a good one.

It's not bad. Super salty.

It's mostly salt.

There's like a little bit of smoke going on.

There's a little bit of flavor.

There's no texture at all.

As soon as you bite into it,

it just like becomes like basically a powder.

You can see it.

It's just too crispy.

This has zero texture.

When you're eating bacon,

the way it was raised affects texture.

I would imagine this is a CAFO animal,

meaning it's like was born inside in a building

and it lived a very short life inside that building

before it was converted into bacon.

Market Pantry.

Target brand.

Yeah, it's not good.

Sodium phosphate in here is being used to retain moisture.

It almost has like a film,

like I almost want to say slimy.

That's when you know it's phosphate.

Just another like safeguard to making sure

like you can't get sick eating this.

What they're doing when I said they're pumping it up

with this stuff is they're selling you water.

Moisture is the enemy of like, you know,

the browning effect.

It's gonna steam more than it caramelizes.

This is budget bacon.

Let's be honest, all these bacons are budget bacons.

You're just getting enough out of this

to be able to call it bacon.

You're losing flavor and complexity

and all the incredible things like smokiness and depth

that we love about a really good bacon.

I think this is like a bacon graveyard.

Feel bad for the hog.

[Voice-Over] Good & Gather No Sugar, Uncured.

This bacon has the worst fat to meat ratio so far.

This comes from the sirloin end of the belly.

The reason this is so lean is because this right here

And this right here are the beginning of the leg muscles

that are gonna go through the rest of the animal,

which means it's not gonna be as flavorful to start with,

'cause this doesn't have as much fat.

I got a little thing of smoke going on here,

so I like that.

The flavor's not bad.

It's balanced, but it could use more salt.

It could use more sugar.

The smoke's actually pretty nice on it.

Not too crunchy.

It's not crumbling in my mouth and falling apart.

There's a little bit of bite.

I like the texture.

I like that it's a little bit thicker.

It's not overly fatty.

I still get that chew of the meat too.

With the lean muscles, again, the salts and the sugars

and the smoke aren't really gonna be able to like

sing you a song.

Whoever made this, whichever company,

I'm sure they're using the whole belly.

So it's just a matter of like, this is the package we got.

They have a pretty good bacon.

This might be the best one.

Good and gather.

So this is another Target brand,

much better than the last one.

No sugar has a place.

People, they can't have as much sugar.

I get it.

They need to have a product for them.

I've never had a bacon

with fermented rice extract powder before.

It's creating depth, definitely creating a level

of caramelization, and it's definitely giving it sweetness.

The rice malt adds sugars, it says on the back.

So there are naturally occurring sugars.

I think I like fermented rice extract powder.

Way to go, Target.

If you have to have no sugar,

I guess, then this is for you.

[Voice-Over] Trader Joe's Uncured Apple Smoked.

This looks good.

You have that blackening around the edges.

Little bit of smoke, little greasy.

Noticeable sweetness off this one for the aroma.

This is okay.

Very sweet.

Not a lot of salt.

It's not balanced.

Bigger smoke flavor on this one

than almost all the other ones.

Texture is pretty good.

Chewy.

It's a lot of fat.

I mean, part of me wants to say it's maple.

It doesn't have like the depth

that I would get from like brown sugar.

Something's going on here.

I wish it was saltier, but the smoke's great.

The texture's great.

I like the thickness.

Thumbs up.

It's okay.

Trader Joe's.

Applewood smoked uncured bacon.

Applewood smoke.

Sure sounds good.

I don't really taste anything.

It's usually a lighter smoke.

So that's the first time we're seeing sodium lactate.

Anytime you see an acid, there's a preservation value.

They're trying to drop the pH levels.

Probably trying to add a layer of complexity

to the flavors as well.

I'm not really a fan.

I don't recommend this.

[Voice-Over] Oscar Mayer Fully Cooked Original.

Very thin,

kind of looks like it's going to be like crispy,

but then it becomes foldable.

That's not what you want.

You want it to kind of like stand at attention,

have some self-respect.

This screams continental breakfast.

I think we found my least favorite.

Salt to sugar feels like it's balanced here.

Everything's like just there.

I mean, it's not good.

That's for sure.

I do taste some smoke on this.

The texture's bad.

I don't know whose idea it was to cut this so thin,

being so fatty.

I'm pretty sad right now.

There's something off for sure.

I know what this is.

It's Oscar Mayer already cooked bacon.

Oscar Mayer Fully Cooked bacon.

Have bacon anytime, any day, anywhere.

The dead giveaway is you get these little ridges,

possibly the reheating process that gives it that quality.

Microwave on high until warm or to desired crispiness.

It is so thin that in the microwave,

it will fry itself crispy with just the fat on its own skin.

Like why are you buying fully cooked bacon?

The only way I can think is

if you're a five-year-old living on your own.

It is interesting to note though,

that Oscar Mayer out of all of these

has the aroma of smokier bacon.

It is a hundred percent real bacon.

What else would it be?

The most expensive bacon we've tried today.

This is America and convenience is expensive.

Honestly, my biggest takeaway from this whole day,

I like Oscar Mayer again.

We're back.

[Voice-Over] Wright Brand Hickory Thick Cut.

Looks pretty good.

It's fatty.

I like that.

[Will] It's thick cut.

This has a good smell to it.

Got good fat to it.

So, all right, here we go.

This is a really good bacon.

High in the salt, not a bad thing,

except for my state of health right now.

It's smoky.

It's got a little bit more complexity to it.

It's got a little bit more depth.

We have a great bacon.

The texture's pretty good.

It's holding up.

Salty, sweet, crunchy, fatty.

This is pretty good. This is a more premium one.

Wright Brand, bacon the Wright way.

Real wood smoked,

hickory and thick cooked bacon, 1 1/2 pounds.

I like it.

This is more of your traditional thick slab.

It's not as thick as Peter Luger.

It could be thicker still.

Any guess who's distributing it?

It's Tyson made.

Oh, God damn it.

I take it all back.

This is Tyson's luxury brand.

I don't want it to be, but the bacon's pretty good.

It is. It doesn't have

a lot of like performative advertising.

It's just like, here's bacon.

We smoked it with wood.

There's a lot of it in here.

What else do I need to know?

Really, I would buy this.

This is good.

[Voice-Over] Appleton Farms Premium Sliced.

Hey, we're back to some wavy bacon, all right.

Decent little string of fat in there, but a leaner pig.

This one smells sweetness.

It's thin, it's cartoony, it's high in fat,

center cut, just crumbled in my hands.

This has all of the features we know to be

of a cheap, not good bacon.

It's taste as sweet as it smells.

Okay, balanced.

Little bit of smoke.

I just got a burst of salt with the fat, which is great.

So I think the fat is like really essential.

It's unfortunate that it's like pretty lean.

No noticeable, you know, crispiness.

Thin and it dissolves in your mouth.

Bacon's trying to dissolve in your mouth.

I'm not really getting that kind of like rendered,

crisp, creamy fat.

One of the main things that I'm looking for

when I'm eating bacon.

I'm definitely disappointed.

This is a pretty good bacon.

Appleton Farms Premium Sliced bacon,

hardwood smoked.

They sell these at Aldi's.

I've never been.

Premium means nothing.

And it has no definition within the USDA.

So you can put it on the label for anything.

It's just marketing.

There's nothing premium about this.

[Voice-Over] Kirkland Signature Hickory Smoked.

Gotta say, good looking bacon.

It's crispy.

I would say a decent meat to fat ratio.

It has a well-balanced, slightly smoky smell.

It's not bad.

I mean, it's good.

We had a good balance of salt and sugar there.

It's got a little bit of complexity.

Has a nice light smoke to it.

Good texture.

You get that crispiness.

It's got bite to it, chew.

A little bit, finally, of that like crunchy creaminess

from the fat.

Good quality bacon.

I don't have bad things to say about this bacon.

Costco or something like that?

Kirkland. All right.

I should have known.

Oh, it's Costco.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, this is a pretty solid bacon.

As far as commercial big brand bacons go,

it's pretty good.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

This is nice.

They did a good job.

[Voice-Over] Smithfield Cherrywood Smoked.

It's a little greasy.

Can smell the smoke coming off of it.

No, I don't like this bacon.

Not ideal.

This isn't as balanced.

There's not a lot of flavor.

The smoke is actually the most pronounced thing here.

It just feels like something's added there.

A little bit cardboardy.

A lot of chewiness on this.

Fat to meat ratio is not good.

So it's gotta be like 80% fat right there.

It's nuts.

You can kind of like separate the protein layers

like down the middle with the fat layer.

And that one's gotta be Smithfield, right?

Hey!

Smithfield is, I think,

supposed to be our largest pork producer,

old heritage company, then slowly piece by piece bought

by a Chinese company.

They are the [beep] worst.

Their bacon sucks now.

Cherrywood smoked

has that like kind of sweeter taste to it.

Dumb to say it's a fruitier wood, but it is.

Just like applewood, these fruitier woods,

they're supposed to be a little bit softer,

a little bit more fruity, obviously.

It's going to lend a sweetness to the end product.

This one does say it's thick cut.

It's not really what I would consider

like a thick cut bacon.

There's just no world where that's thick cut.

When we talk about like the problems

with like commercialized farming in the world,

Tyson, Smithfield, this is them.

Don't buy this stuff.

It's not bad.

I'm not a huge fan.

[Voice-Over] Jamestown Brand Hardwood Smoked.

Some weird irregular slices,

but I'm not angry about it.

The more manicured something looks,

it feels unnatural.

This looks like what I would want to eat

if I hadn't eaten so much bacon already.

It's good. Salt and sugar

are balanced here.

I'm getting a little bit of smoke.

Doesn't have a lot of complexity to it.

It's crispy.

It's chewy.

You know, we're getting closer

to that creamy, crisp texture.

This might be my favorite texture

of any of the bacons we've tried.

Definitely a little on the fatty side.

Good fat.

This is sandwich bacon to me.

It will keep its crunch.

It's got, you know, big wavy curls on it.

That's all right.

Jamestown Brand.

Oh, what do you know?

It's made in Smithfield, Virginia.

It's definitely budget.

It's so budget that they make you like read upside down

if you want to turn it.

You know this is good when it's misprinted on the back

and it's upside down.

We have to flip this over.

[Ben] Package may contain irregular slices.

These guys are taking the ends and oddball slices

of bacon, probably from a more prestigious line,

selling it to you at the dollar store.

And I'm on board.

You don't know what wood they're smoking it with.

There's probably a little bit of both in the package.

To me, it would mostly mean oak.

I've never seen may contain sugar on a pack before.

Like they're giving themselves some latitude

that it might not have any sugar at all.

I think that this one does have

a little bit of brown sugar in it.

It's interactive.

You can lift the flaps to view.

It's like one of those pop-up books.

This whole product is crazy unhinged to me.

The more I think about this, the more I love it.

I irregularly like it.

You never know what you're gonna get, you know?

So it's a surprise.

It's kind of like the blind box of bacon.

[Voice-Over] Great Value Hickory Smoked.

We're back to the thin cut, the brittle bacon.

Noticeably crispier.

You can even hear it.

[bacon crunching]

It's a little too crunchy.

I feel like, yeah, it's gonna shatter.

It's brittle.

It's not good.

Salt's there and not much else.

It just tastes kind of chemically.

Might be crispy to a fault.

There's no real, like, texture or chew to it.

It's brittle,

so it just, like, doesn't feel that great to eat it.

It's too fatty and too crunchy,

and it sort of breaks apart in your mouth.

I mean, it comes off as lower-end, to be honest.

Great value.

Great value.

That's the Walmart brand.

This is the lowest dollar price per pound

out of everything we're tasting.

If you're okay with, you know, eating factory pig,

factory bacon, then it would be a great value.

This isn't good.

[Voice-Over] Applegate Organics

Hickory Smoked Turkey Bacon.

This is like mean spirited.

This is fake bacon.

This is turkey bacon.

Ground glued turkey that is then cured

an artificially flavored to resemble the flavor of bacon.

I know what it is.

I shouldn't like it.

It's actually not terrible.

It's not great.

It doesn't have that same good feeling

that like you get when you're eating a good piece of bacon.

Is the salt and sugar balanced?

Sure. I would assume

it has to be turkey.

It looks like a denser musculature than a chicken.

So I'm kind of curious.

What am I eating?

Okay.

It's Applegate Organics Uncured Turkey Bacon.

That makes more sense.

Oh, that's cute.

The barn is the bar code.

It's the barn code.

You're not gonna get a crispy outside on this

because there's no fat to cook it.

So it's just always gonna be kind of like a soft texture,

which is unfortunate.

I wouldn't really call this bacon.

It's not a terrible alternative to me.

It's just, it's not really in the same category.

It doesn't look that appealing.

And if I want bacon,

I kind of just want pork bacon because it's yummy.

[Patrick] I mean, the ingredients are similar

to the first Applegate.

Their pork bacon sucks,

but their turkey bacon, pretty good.

[Voice-Over] Now let's see which bacon our experts

liked the most and the least.

My favorite today, surprisingly, it was the Oscar Mayer.

Oscar Mayer, what the hell, man?

It doesn't mean that it had the best flavor,

it didn't mean that it had the best texture,

but I feel like it had the best combination of all that.

The salt and sugar was balanced.

The smoke level was there.

You stayed true to who you are.

You're still rocking the wiener car.

And honestly, as an added perk,

your crazy microwavable one, I'm into it.

The Whole Foods Center Cut bacon

that I'm used to cooking at home

is actually one of my favorites.

Just perfectly salty, sweet, smoky,

really well-balanced. It's a great bacon.

They were the only ones that didn't, you know,

label uncured bacon,

but actually have celery powder in the back.

That's impressive. The Kirkland had

a really good flavor.

It had a good aroma.

I don't dabble in a lot of Costco products.

I understand now why so many people swear by them.

Another one that I was really surprised about,

Target, Good & Gather.

You labeled it no sugar.

You weren't lying about it.

There was no added cane sugars or anything like that.

You had vinegar in there.

You have the fermented rice in there.

Smart alternatives that add a little bit more complexity.

Someone deserves a raise in that, R&D team.

There were some bacons that I did not like.

The Applegate was the worst of all the bacons that I tried.

Which honestly, I was kind of shocked by.

Applegate really seemed to go to extremes

to try to make you feel safe and make you feel comfortable.

You were supposed to be the large box store,

natural gourmet alternative

to all the Boar's Head processed meats of the world.

But man, that was bad bacon, really brittle.

[Patrick] It was lacking in flavor, aroma,

and like eating bacon dust.

No real smoke.

Probably worst of all, it costs a lot.

When your turkey bacon is better than your pork bacon,

we got problems.

The market pantry from Target,

it literally shattered like glass all over this table.

Proteins are not supposed to do that.

It was completely inedible.

There was no good aroma from it.

It looked bad.

The flavor was substantially lacking

and it was like eating dust.

Bacon was not created in America, but it's like pizza.

We have taken it, it is ours.

It is a fundamental perfect food.

I don't think a lot of other foods get to live

in that space of like, even when you're bad,

you're still pretty good.

I think that it's important to remember

that brand names have the reputations

that they have for a reason.

Is it the best product? Absolutely not,

but it is definitely the most consistent product.

If you want something really, really, really good,

my advice to you, don't get it at a big grocery store.

Get something that respects the history

and art form of bacon and what makes it delicious.

I have only felt my chest tighten once

around number seven.

Why am I not wearing a heart monitor right now?

I should be, there should be a doctor on site at least

for this to just like shake their head in shame.

Crazy thing about this journey is that

my dad was a Jewish cardiologist.

That's, I'm being serious.