The Best Supermarket Bacon

Bacon is made from cured pork belly, the fatty strip of meat found on the underside of a pig. Curing bacon is a process of preservation that uses salt and two additives, sodium nitrite and either sodium ascorbate or sodium erythorbate. These ingredients inhibit the growth of harmful bacteria and give bacon its characteristic pink color and “cured” flavor. If a label reads “uncured,” it just means that synthetic sodium nitrite hasn’t been used. Instead, uncured bacon usually contains celery powder, a natural source of nitrates. Any bacon labeled “uncured” has still undergone the same chemical curing process as conventional bacon, giving it the same pinkish color, distinctive flavor, and preservation. A sweetener (sugar or dextrose) is added to the cure to enhance flavor, and sodium phosphate is often included to help the bacon retain moisture.

Historically, a dry cure was applied to the pork and left to cure for months. Now, most large-scale producers dissolve the cure ingredients in water to make a brine. One option is to immerse the bellies in the brine, which can take weeks. To make the process more efficient, most manufacturers inject the brine directly into the meat, cutting the cure time down to 6 to 24 hours. The injected bellies are usually tumbled in drums to help distribute the cure throughout the meat.

After curing, the bellies are cooked to a low temperature (115 to 125 degrees) and smoked, often simultaneously. Cooking helps drive out moisture from the wet cures, making the meat firmer and easier to slice; smoking contributes flavor and adds antimicrobial properties to the exterior. Traditionally, producers burned logs, chips, or even sawdust to create smoke. Today, some producers use liquid smoke in addition to or in place of wood smoke. After the cooking and smoking process, the bacon is chilled, shaped, sliced, packaged, and finally sent out to market.

There is no industry standard dictating how thick a piece of bacon must be to warrant a thick-cut classification. However, our research shows that this term really does indicate that the bacon will be thicker. When measured raw, thick-cut products ranged from 3.1 to 4.5 millimeters thick, and regular products were 1.7 to 3 millimeters thick. Thicker bacon usually has a chewier texture because it’s harder to dehydrate the “lean,” or the meaty portion, and moisture lingers in the interior, said Gordon Smith, late professor of grain science at Kansas State University, when we previously interviewed him.

In our tasting of regular bacon, our panelists liked products at the full range of the thickness spectrum. Our favorite fell in the middle; the second- and third-place bacons were the thickest and thinnest, respectively. When it came to products labeled as “thick-cut,” however, our tasters decisively preferred truly thick bacon; our winner is by far the thickest and had a “nice bite to it.”

Fat and protein content can also contribute to texture. Responding to consumer demand for leaner meat in the 1980s, farmers began to breed and raise hogs with less fat and more muscle. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to understand how much fat and protein a product truly has just by looking at the packaging. The nutrition label measures the bacon after it’s cooked, when most of the original fat has melted away but all the protein remains intact, our science editor Paul Adams explained, and each brand’s cooking method and testing process is different.

• What to Look for: If you like chewier bacon, choose a thick-cut bacon. If you like crispier bacon, look for a thinner product.

Nearly all bacon is pretty salty, which is to be expected of a cured product. Our tasters preferred bacon with moderate sodium levels and didn’t like products with especially high levels of sodium; our bottom-ranked regular and thick-cut bacons had more than 300 milligrams of sodium per 16-gram serving. Bacon should have bold smoky notes giving way to a complementary savory-sweet flavor, but those higher-sodium bacons lacked nuance.

Tasters also preferred products that had a noticeable sweetness, but sweetness levels are more difficult to discern just by looking at the label. Sugar is an essential component of bacon production, and it’s used in everything we tasted. However, almost every product in our lineup lists 0 grams of sugar in its nutritional information. According to Food and Drug Administration regulations, packaged food can have up to 0.49 grams of sugar per serving and still report 0 grams of sugar on its label. Still, our panel preferred products that tasted a little sweet, perhaps to offset the saltiness.

• What to Look for: Moderate sodium levels of less than 300 milligrams per 16-gram serving.

Many manufacturers still use real wood to smoke their bacon; when they do, the words “naturally smoked” or “hardwood smoked” appear on their packaging. If the ingredient list reads “smoke flavor,” liquid smoke has been added to the cure. Smith explained that many bacon producers—even those that use real smoke—also apply liquid smoke externally, spraying it on the pork bellies. Because the liquid isn’t added to the cure, it doesn’t have to be listed as an ingredient, which makes it hard to tell whether or not it has been used. “Smoke flavor” was listed as an ingredient in just one bacon we sampled, and tasters noticed “off flavors” and a “weird aftertaste.”

• What to Look for: “Naturally smoked” or “hardwood smoked”; no liquid smoke.

Tasters enjoyed almost all of the regular bacons in our lineup, but our favorite is Trader Joe’s Uncured Dry Rubbed Sliced Bacon. With a moderate sodium level and a balance of quintessential bacon flavors—“salt, smoke, and sweet”—it was just what we wanted in bacon. Medium-thick with a little more protein than fat, it had a noticeable chew that tasters loved.

Thick-cut bacon garnered especially ardent fans. Our favorite thick-cut bacon is Wright Hickory Real Wood Smoked Thick-Cut Bacon. Out of the thick-cut products in our lineup, it was by far the thickest. Tasters said it looked like “fancier bacon” with a “nice mahogany, lacquered appearance.” It wasn’t too salty, and was slightly smoky and sweet. Happily, it was also the least expensive (per ounce) of the bacons we tried.

Whether you choose a regular bacon or a thick-cut bacon comes down to personal preference. We picked winners in both categories and organized our lineup below into separate sections so you can look for our favorites in whichever style is right for you.