Cooking

Forget the Bacon: Go Pancetta

Pancetta is Better Than Bacon

Pan-fried, excess fat drained. Crisp but tender.

Pan-fried, excess fat drained. Crisp but tender.

What’s better than bacon? Ok, admittedly very little. But in recipes, it turns out that pancetta > bacon.

I’ve been using bacon in plenty of bean and slow cooker recipes, and it works fine for flavor. But uncooked bacon leaves behind a stringy mess that needs to be fished out later, and cooked bacon is too… cooked.

The answer is diced pancetta, sold in packages in the deli aisle of nearly every supermarket, though I prefer the Citterio Cubetti that I can get at Trader Joe’s. Why? Because Citterio is finely diced into nice, uniform pieces, much more so than other brands or what I’ve been able to achieve by dicing it on my own.

I’m now using the pancetta in all of my bacon recipes, including:

Next time you’re making something that needs that salty bacon bite, try the pancetta.

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