Slicing Bacon

[Donw]

Now that I have finished my first batch of bacon, I am having a time trying to determine the best direction to slice it. I want to cut cross grained, but I am finding it hard to read the meat. Does the muscle run from the back down, or does it run from the tail to the snout?

[Spinaker]

The muscle fibers on the bellies stretch from the animals shoulder area, across there abdomen. With pork belly, I never really think about it. There is so much more fat than meat that I don't really know if it makes a difference.

[ComfortablyNumb]

Spinaker Do you take into account which side the pig lays on?

[Spinaker]

Hahaha, always. ComfortablyNumb

[Donw]

Thank you for the diagram. It helps a lot in picturing the muscles when slicing. The slicing direction did not make a difference with thin slices, but it seemed to with thicker ones where some pieces reminded me of jerky.

[HorseDoctor]

There are 3 (or more) muscles that come into play in pork belly. They run at various angles to each other but more or less kinda, sorta follow a "head to tail" direction. I like to slice across that direction to crosscut most of the muscles. That’s the same direction that commercial bacon is sliced. If you get belly that is already skinned you can likely see lines left by the skinning process running on the skin side from front to back making it easy to identify. If you are skinning a whole belly yourself, front to back is the long direction of the belly. It it’s already cut you can ID the nipples on the skin to identify front to back. Good idea to score a line in the fat as you remove the skin so you can tell which way you want to slice later on.

[Donw]

Thanks for the good advice. Scoring the fat sounds like a neat trick of the trade.