Order bacon in another country and you may not get the strip you pictured. Sometimes the cut is different. Sometimes the cure is different. Sometimes, as with Korean samgyeopsal, there is no cure at all, just pork belly on a grill. We already walked through what part of the pig bacon comes from. This post is about how those cuts get named, cured, and eaten.
American streaky bacon
In the United States, bacon usually means pork belly: a layered cut of meat and fat, cured with salt, and typically smoked. The stripes in a cooked slice are those layers standing on end, which is why British cooks call this style streaky. Most supermarket packs are wet-cured in a brine, or have the brine pumped in. Sugar often joins the salt, and smoke is part of the taste most Americans expect. The slices go into a skillet or the oven until the fat renders and the edges crisp. That is breakfast bacon, BLT bacon, and only one member of a much larger family.
British and Irish back bacon
In Britain and Ireland, a rasher is often back bacon, cut from the loin. You get a lean eye of meat and a smaller cap of fat, sometimes with a streaky tail of belly still attached. Butchers there, and in Australia, often call that loin-plus-belly slice middle bacon. It is less shatteringly crisp than an American strip, and eats more like a thin cured chop.
The cure is commonly a wet one. Wiltshire curing, a well-known English method, works on whole sides in a brine rather than a hard pack of dry salt. Packs are sold smoked or unsmoked; older English usage sometimes called the unsmoked style green bacon. A rasher usually goes into a pan or onto a grill, then onto a plate with eggs and toast, or into a sandwich. Ireland also uses a larger cured joint of loin, collar, or shoulder, simmered and served with cabbage and potatoes. In Irish and British English, "bacon" can mean a piece of cured pork you carve, not only a strip you fry.
Peameal bacon, and the Canadian mix-up
Peameal bacon is a Canadian style, especially tied to Ontario. In 2016, Toronto officially named the peameal bacon sandwich a city signature dish. It starts with pork loin, wet-cured in a brine of salt, sugar, and spices, then rolled in cornmeal, which leaves a yellow crust. It is not smoked. It is usually sold raw, then sliced and cooked on a griddle. On a soft bun with mustard, it is lean, mild, a little like ham, with a sandy edge from the meal.
The name comes from an older coating of ground yellow peas, used to help the meat keep. Cornmeal replaced the peas, but the word stuck. English back-bacon curing came to Canada with nineteenth-century immigrants, and Toronto pork packer William Davies is often associated with the style, though the exact origin is hard to pin on a single shop or year.
What many Americans call Canadian bacon is a related idea and a different product: lean, smoked, ham-like rounds of loin, often sold already cooked. The loin is the common thread; the smoke and the cornmeal are not.
Pancetta and guanciale
Italy is not trying to make breakfast strips. Pancetta is pork belly, cured with salt and spices such as black pepper, garlic, or juniper. It is usually unsmoked; a smoked version is called affumicata. It is sold flat, as pancetta tesa, or rolled into a log, as pancetta arrotolata. Thin slices can go on a plate like cold cuts, and cubes get rendered for pasta, beans, and a soffritto. It is typically saltier and more thoroughly dried than a regular American pack.
Guanciale comes from the jowl; guancia means cheek. It is dry-cured with salt, pepper, and often herbs, then hung to dry, usually for longer than pancetta. Cooks prize the fat as much as the meat, especially in carbonara, amatriciana, and gricia. Pancetta will do in a pinch, but it is not the same cut.
Speck, in more than one sense
In German, speck is a broad word, not a single product. Everyday Bauchspeck is cured, often smoked pork belly, diced and browned to flavor beans, cabbage, and soups.
The most famous namesake is Südtiroler Speck, or Speck Alto Adige, from South Tyrol in northern Italy. That one is not belly bacon. It is made from a boned pork leg, dry-salted and rubbed with spices such as pepper, juniper, and garlic, then lightly cold-smoked and air-dried for many weeks. For the protected style, that rest commonly runs about five months or longer. People eat it in thin slices with bread and pickles, or cook it into dumplings. It is a lightly smoked, firmly dried ham you can eat as is.
Samgyeopsal, when the belly skips the cure
Korean samgyeopsal starts with the same cut as American bacon, pork belly, and then does almost none of the same things to it. The name refers to the three visible layers of meat and fat. The meat is usually fresh: not cured, not smoked, and often barely seasoned before it hits the grill. You cook it at the table, cut it into bites with scissors, and eat it wrapped in lettuce or perilla with ssamjang, garlic, and scallion salad, or dipped in salt and sesame oil. The kinship with bacon is the cut, not the cure.
Chinese lap yuk
Chinese cured pork belly is often called Chinese bacon in English. In Mandarin it is là ròu; in Cantonese, lap yuk. It is usually pork belly, cut into strips, cured, and hung to dry, often in cool weather ahead of the Lunar New Year. Cantonese versions are often seasoned with soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, and spices, then air-dried. In parts of Sichuan and Hunan, smoking plays a bigger role.
It is not a breakfast rasher. The meat is usually cooked first, often by steaming, then sliced into clay pot rice, stir-fries, or savory cakes such as turnip cake.
If you want that bacon taste on eggs or potatoes when you do not have the real thing, a shake of bacon salt will get you in the neighborhood. It will not stand in for a rasher, a slice of pancetta, or a wrap of samgyeopsal. It is just the flavor, traveling light.
The history of bacon is mostly a story about salt, smoke, and making pork last. Around the world, that story picked up local cuts and local habits, and the word never settled on just one of them.
