Whole Foods Market is holding a bacon contest through the end of July. You can enter by submitting your best recipe or creative use for bacon via their Meat Department Facebook page where you can also vote for your favorite entries (and tell your friends to vote for yours!). The complete details are here:
Win A Year of Bacon! To celebrate our sizzling hot bacon, we’re holding an online contest on Facebook to find the next big bacon idea. Bacon chocolates, cocktails and salt have been hits. What’s next? Share your idea and be entered to win a Year of Bacon. (Yes, a Year of Bacon!) Enter and vote for your favorites in the Bacon Smackdown going on between now and July 31 at facebook.com/wholefoodsmeat.
The grand prize winner chosen by Whole Foods Market receives a Year of Bacon, and the top 10 ideas as “liked” by the Facebook community receive $50 Whole Foods Market gift cards. Winners will be announced August 10, 2012. We expect the competition to be smokin’ hot, so good luck to all!
Theo Weening, Global Meat Coordinator for Whole Foods Market, had this to add about the bacon they sell at Whole Foods Market, “Bacon is one of the most versatile meats out there. I love it with blue cheese on a grass-fed beef burger. My daughter loves to dip it in maple syrup with pancakes. It’s tasty no matter how you slice it. Plus, all of the bacon we sell at Whole Foods Market comes from approved producers who raise the animals without antibiotics and cure the bacon with naturally-occurring salts, rather than synthetic nitrates or nitrites. So it’s naturally delicious.”
Regular readers of this site may recall last year’s Charcutepalooza posts, one of which involved curing your own bacon from pork belly (see above photo).
So to say I’m a bacon fan is a bit of an understatement. One of my favorite uses for bacon (actually two very similar ones) involves putting it in a sandwich, specifically a BLT or a grilled cheese with bacon and tomato. We’re coming up on the prime time of year for both those sandwiches and I cannot wait. For this Whole Foods Market bacon contest I would offer up something a little more indulgent and very local.
Ingredients
- Seven Stars Bakery baguette OR Olga’s Cup + Saucer foccacia
- 4-6 strips of cooked bacon
- 2 thick slices of a freshly picked RI tomato
- kosher salt
- 2-3 slices of Narragansett Creamery mozzarella
- fresh ground black pepper
- handful of RI arugula
- extra virgin olive oil
Instructions
- Slice in half either an 8" length of baguette from Seven Stars Bakery or a square of focaccia from Olga’s Cup + Saucer. Layer bacon, tomato, a sprinkling of salt, mozzarella, ground black pepper and arugula tossed in a tiny bit of the olive oil, in between the slices, adjusting the salt, pepper and oil depending on the saltiness of the bacon and the strength of the arugula. Eat!
