Hardwood smoked or naturally smoked: If a bacon is labeled "hardwood smoked" or "naturally smoked," though, it has actually gone into a smoker, instead of just being injected with liquid smoke.

pork Oscar Mayer Naturally Hardwood Smoked Bacon is slow smoked and hand-trimmed from the finest cuts of pork. With all this great flavor, everything you make will be better.

The words “Naturally Wood Smoked” define a process by which we hang our products in our smokehouse and allow the meat to absorb smoke from smoldering fires using real hardwood chips. This gives added flavor and color to meat without using artificial smoke flavoring.

Carefully selected cuts of pork are used to make our delicious thick cut bacon. Each bacon slice is slow smoked with real wood, making it a tasty addition to breakfast sandwiches and BLTs alike.

Fuming or smoking involves putting the oak into an enclosed environment in which ammonia is introduced into the atmosphere. This enclosed environment might be a closed tank or a sealed tent or some form of container into which only a relatively small amount of ammonia is introduced.

Hard woods burn slower, longer and hotter than softwoods. They are preferred during long cooks because they add better flavor to meats. Hickory, oak, maple, pecan and alder are all hardwoods. Pork responds very well to hickory and maple smoke.

In 1924, Oscar F. Mayer (who'd started a butcher shop in Chicago with his brother Gottfried) patented presliced, packed bacon. Soon, Mayer added the brand's signature yellow band, which quickly became an instantly recognizable guarantee of quality. That was important.

Naturally Hardwood Smoked Bacon Oscar Mayer Naturally Hardwood Smoked Bacon is slow smoked and hand-trimmed from the finest cuts of pork. With all this great flavor, everything you make will be better.

Once a pork belly has been cured, it's typically smoked and heated to about 130 degrees. This process adds the distinctive smoky taste that we have all come to love. It also helps to hold the red, cured color, and sure makes it easier for the bacon to be cleanly sliced.

The drying action of the smoke tends to preserve the meat, though many of the chemicals present in wood smoke (e.g., formaldehyde and certain alcohols) are natural preservatives as well. Smoking is one of the oldest of food preservation methods, probably having arisen shortly after the development of cooking with fire.

As a general rule, we would recommend intense hard woods such as oak and mesquite for meats with big flavour to stand up to it such as beef. Fruit and lighter woods are often paired with fish or vegatables, and cherry is often the favourite when smoking pork.

Hickory Hickory gives a sweet, yet strong bacon-flavor flavor to the meat, which is more intense than cherry, apple, or alder wood. However, its profile is milder compared to mesquite wood. The main reason most people prefer using hickory is that it gives a dark color to the meat.