Here at Zingerman's News, we asked a few food-lovin' folks consider two key ingredients in the perfect breakfast: Bacon and coffee. Ari sat down with Allen Leibowitz, roastmaster at Zingerman's Coffee Co., and Grace Singleton, managing partner at Zingerman's Delicatessen to taste a few of our terrific roasts along with our favorite bacons. (I know, I know. It's a tough job but... ) Grace took the notes and reported back to us so we can share a few tips for your next morning meal!

From Grace's notebook:
Zingerman's Delicatessen, Friday June 5, 10 am

"We tasted four coffees. Allen brought beans & brewed them in a pour-over filter style pot. We sampled Brazilian peaberry, Guatemalan, Ethiopian sidamo and Sumatran. From the Deli kitchen, we cooked up 5 bacons: Nueske's applewood smoked, Broadbent's, Edward's Virginia Bacon, Arkansas peppered and Hungarian smoked [all featured in Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon! — ed.]

Our top picks for flavor combinations were the following, but know that none of them were bad — bacon goes great with coffee and all of the coffees and bacons were tasting great on their own."

Nueske's bacon + Guatemalan Antigua
"The sweetness of the apple smoke seemed to really be highlighted with this coffee. The Guatemalan was just tasting fantastic and this combination seemed to really play off each other and bring out all the positives. Ari's favorite of the day."

Edwards bacon + Ethiopian Sidamo
"A very smooth combination with a long lasting finish. To me, the combination brought out the meaty, leathery flavors and the tannic aspect of this coffee was great with the rich fat flavors of the bacon."

Arkansas Peppered bacon + Sumatran
"The full-bodied pairing of the day. The Sumatran's deep dark flavors stood up well to the pepper while still allowing the brown sugar sweetness used in the cure of this bacon to come out. This one was my favorite — especially when you need a bit of a jolt to wake up in the morning. This one will do it!"

Broadbent's bacon + Brazilian Peaberry
"Both of these were the lightest, most delicate flavored of what we tasted, and they worked together well. The Broadbent bacon has a butteriness to it and was lighter on the smokiness, and the peaberry seemed to bring out the smoke in a very pleasant way and the flavors of the coffee balanced well.

Hungarian bacon + Brazilian Peaberry
"Almost the opposite of the Broadbent — the Hungarian bacon is double smoked, but rather than overpowering the lightest of the coffees we tasted, when combined together it seemed to enhance the frutiness of the peaberry. This was Allen's favorite."

Nueske's Applewood-smoked Bacon from Wisconsin
Take it from the late and very great R. W. Apple of the New York Times: Nueske's is "the beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of rashers." Its flavor is meaty, subtly sweet (I think as much from the applewood as from the sugar in the cure), moderately smoky and so good that we've been cooking it every single morning at the Deli for over 27 years.

Over all these years Nueske's has remained one of the most popular foods we sell anywhere in our organization. Its flavor is on the mellower side: the soft sweetness from the applewood seems to amplify the natural sweetness in that high-quality pork the family goes to such lengths to source. We serve lots of Nueske's at the Deli, and lots more to folks who cook it in their own kitchens. If you visit you can try it on any number of Zingerman's sandwiches.

Arkansas Peppered Bacon and Bacon with Long Pepper
One of my long-time favorites, this special pepper-coated bacon is cured and smoked in the foothills of the Ozarks. Part of what I love about this bacon is that it's less sweet but still nicely spicy and very meaty — so meaty in fact that it's not my bacon of choice when I'm rendering fat or using the bacon as an ingredient in another dish. (I'd class that as a good problem, but if you're using it in recipes you might want to plan ahead by buying a bit more or having a little extra fat on hand.) It is darned good stuff, though. As Rick Strutz, one of our managing partners at the Deli, said while eating it on a pimento cheese sandwich, "Damn, I could eat this bacon all day!"

The peppered bacon is pretty much excellent on everything from sandwiches and burgers (especially with a well-aged cheddar, or the just-mentioned pimento cheese) to egg dishes. But because of its more interesting, complex finish, I really like it with sweet ingredients: it's nice with citrus, or sprinkled over an autumn salad of apples, toasted nuts and very good lettuces. It's also great chopped and liberally sprinkled over a warm poached egg atop a salad of fresh frisée. To add an extra dimension, you can also try any of these same dishes topped with a bit of orange-olive oil (i.e., an oil for which the olives and oranges have been pressed together, not a lower-end version where orange oil has been added after the pressing has already taken place).

Edwards' Bacon from Virginia
The family's history with pork began in 1925, when Sam Edwards' grandfather started serving passengers his homemade ham sandwiches while captaining the ferryboat his father had started on the cross-river route between Surry and Jamestown Island. The ham that Sam's grandfather served on that ferry was cured just as he'd learned to do on the family farm. He gained such acclaim for his sandwiches that in 1926 he started a business to sell whole hams. Bacon and sausage followed soon after.

With all that background it's no shock I suppose that Sam Edwards still makes some seriously good bacon and ham. The curing and smoking is still done pretty much the way his grandfather and father did it in their time. (Actually, Sam's dad still stops in a couple of times a week to make sure Sam hasn't strayed from the porky path.)

The flavor of Edwards' bacon is sweet and smoky at the same time, terrific for eating as is on sandwiches, or for flavoring anything from Hoppin' John to cornbread to seafood stew. For reasons that I can't really explain this is also the bacon I like best with eggs. It's definitely a bacon for bigger-flavored dishes. Although Sam prefers it cooked on the soft side, I prefer it more crisply cooked myself. It's darned good chopped and tossed on a big bowl of grits (the good ones, like Anson Mills: I have exceedingly low patience for low-level industrial grits), along with eggs over easy and a couple of slices of top-notch toast. And speaking of toast, Edwards' is equally great on a toasted fried-egg sandwich.

Benton's Bacon from Eastern Tennessee
Three Really Big Reasons to Try Benton's Bacon
1. This is Southern Foodways Alliance leader, food writer and exceptionally tasteful individual of great character and outstanding word selection John T. Edge's favorite bacon.
2. Allan Benton is, seriously, one of the nicest people I've ever met, in the food world or out.
3. Benton's bacon is really good — very special stuff with big, impossible-to-miss flavor. The production methods that Allan learned growing up are similar to what Sam Edwards and others are doing, but with his family's own western Virginia mountain twist. For starters, Allan's gradually moving most of his production to Berkshire pork, and I'd guess within a few more years Benton's bacon will be produced only from the bellies of heirloom breeds. The freshly arrived bellies get a rubdown with brown sugar and salt. After a couple weeks of curing they're rinsed and re-rubbed with more salt and sugar, then left to cure for another two weeks. Finally the bacon gets about 48 hours in the smoker, mostly over hickory.

The length of the cure and the long smoke time (nearly twice what most folks do) are clearly the biggest contributors to the intensity of the Benton's flavor. This is not a bacon that lingers casually out on the edge of your eating. It's a deep confluence of smoke, salt and sweet: none dominates, all are pronounced. In the same way that people who love a great glass of stout or porter have a hard time with lighter beers, so, too, are Benton's fans reluctant to leave their longtime favorite off the menu.

My favorite thing is to serve it — and its fat, in all its smoky glory — over a bowl of hot mush made from exceptional Anson Mills cornmeal. While it probably sounds plain, that simple dish, made with two incredibly good ingredients, is actually amazingly delicious. I think of it as the Southern equivalent of eating just-cooked Martelli spaghetti tossed in a great Tuscan olive oil and topped with freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and black pepper.

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