Sourcing the best Britain has to offer can spoil a good burger in short order. A prized cut of dry-aged, grass-fed beef that’s ideal for a steak might be too lean and therefore eat too dry for a burger. The finest farmhouse raw-milk Cheddar can re-solidify as the heat-exuded moisture evaporates, seizing up the smooth, melty texture a cheeseburger demands. And award-winning dry cure back bacon can be too chewy to cut cleanly with your teeth. You bite into a burger and end up pulling an entire rasher (strip) out from under the soft bun.
When the great British philosopher Francis Bacon said “hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper” he might have been thinking about back bacon and burgers.
Too many London chefs pay too little attention to bacon texture and burgers. For their benefit and ultimately ours I’ve devised an easy finger test to determine if a cooked rasher has the right texture for a burger: Try eating it with your fingers rather than a knife and fork. If bite-sized pieces break off easily to the chew you’re good to go. But if it’s neither tender nor crisp but stretches instead like rubber then fuggedaboutit. I have zero problem enjoying a bacon burger made by a British chef with Michelin aspirations so long as (s)he has its restaurant guide and not its tyres in mind.
The finger test ultimately raises the streaky vs back bacon question. Americans eat mostly what the British call streaky bacon, which is made from pork belly and crisps more easily than back bacon from the pork loin. Streaky is probably the better choice for burgers, but that’s easy for this New Yorker-in-London to say. Many British prefer meatier back bacon to shrivelled streaky and insist on using it for burgers, much as they would for bacon sarnies (sandwiches).
I sought advice for cooking back bacon for burgers from a few top producers and chefs but didn’t learn much. One famous name hadn’t a clue what I was going on about. As a result I conducted a very unscientific test myself, pan-frying back bacon in a variety of ways: thin and thickly sliced, medium heat and high heat, with and without a bacon press, fat clipped and not clipped, less crisp and more crisp.
The initial results won’t surprise: Thinner, crisper rashers with or without presses and clipping just about passed the finger test; thicker ones with only the edges browned did not. The most satisfactory result of all, however, was with the rashers I baked over a rack in the oven at 200°C (about 400°F) for first 10 and then 15 minutes. The even, uniform cooking transformed the bacon topography from hummocky to hamburgery.
However you, the burger chef, chooses to cook your back bacon make sure to trim the tough rind from the edge of the fat first. Only a desperate dentist short on work would suggest you leave it on.
Oh my giddy aunt. All that bacon and cheese is making me dribble with excitement. Thanks for the mouth-watering photos and the bacon tips!
Rachel – Coming from you that’s very kind. Your photos on your blog are superb.
Nice article Daniel. As another member of the ‘from-across-the-pond’ brigade, all of my first experiences with pork + burger were of the streaky variety, and one I am quite loyal to.
That said, being over here for so long I do now sometimes use back bacon in my burgers. With streaky, I fry them in a very hot pan with the golden rule being Turn Early and Often, flipping them over at about 30 second intervals (even more frequently as they approach optimal crispy levels).
So I decided to apply a simliar rule to back bacon, and it worked very well indeed, the only addition being a weighted metal tray on top of them to ensure the fatty edges that curled up were properly crisped as well. A bit more laborious, as I had to continuously remove the pan/weight to flip them, but the results easily passed your crispness litmus test.
Sam – Must try the turn-early-and-often method. But suspect I’ll be returning to streaky.
Agreed! My unshakeable accent and slavish devotion to the streaky variety are the two factors that will ensure my never being able to fully assimilate over here 😉
For my homemade burgers I can’t help get more than a little poncey and buy pancetta – which tends to be thinner cut than most ‘streaky bacon’ rashers. I would never fry the bacon to use in a burger – ALWAYS grill it. That way the flesh stays fleshy while the fat goes nice and crispy – which is what I want whenever I’m having bacon. For burgers though, I’ve found over cooking the pancetta so it’s all crisp works perfectly. Crisp, salty, melt-in-the-mouthy. Right, I’ve talked myself into an early dinner – please excuse me…
Burgac – Pancetta is Italian cured streaky bacon. It’s only thinly sliced if you buy it that way.
Thanks for the patronising response! Hopefully you got the point though that the thinner the bacon (streaky or otherwise), the more likely it is to ‘bite’ easily – something vital in a burger context. I happen to prefer grilling to frying bacon as it ends up more texturally pleasing to me. Each to their own though.
Burgerac – I deserved that. You made important additions to the discussion that I failed to properly acknowledge. At the soonest opportunity I will follow your advice and try grilling my bacon.