Hacker News Reader

Comment by supportengineer | Hacker News Reader

I only get the bacon that says "No nitrates, no nitrites"

If you're talking about American-style bacon, and it tastes like bacon, there's no such thing. They're just exploiting labeling rules by selecting very specific nitrite sources. Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.

<strike>This is before we get to the whole premise of avoiding nitrates. Would you eat a beet? That's a serving of industrial bacon's worth of nitrates right there.</strike>

Later

(Actually, super bad example, since the concern is nitrosamines which are formed in the presence of proteins. The point about the illegitimacy of nitrite-free bacon stands!)

I fucking hate beets.

For bacon, what do you think of these?

Applegate:

https://www.raleys.com/product/10400628/applegate-naturals-h...

Coleman:

https://www.raleys.com/product/103101180/coleman-natural-bac...

The Coleman bacon doesn't list ingredients. But the Applegate bacon lists celery powder because that is a source of nitrates. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery_powder

The Coleman one is the one I usually get these days, I used to get the Applegate.

I don't know much about either brand but there are good reasons to buy fancy bacon instead of Smithfield and Hormel, just because of the quality and ethics of the livestock inputs. But nitrites aren't one of those reasons.

Found an image of coleman bacon ingredients list, celery powder is on it as well.

Applegate is notoriously celery-extract-cured. Same chemical endpoints in your body as industrially produced nitrite powder.

There's a really easy way to tell: does it taste like American bacon? Then: nitrites.

Celery powder / extract / etc. are nitrites.

Counterpoint: I fucking love beets. (and bacon. but not together. yuck)

A burger with the lot here in Australia will have beets and bacon. And an egg, probably pineapple too. Lettuce, tomato, cheese. hmm.. I know what I want for lunch today.

I could understand the beetroot when I was Down Under, but the pineapple just had me go "?" similarly to when I was served eggs, pasta, and mushrooms for breakfast.

I just learned to pickle canned beets to have in salads, and they work really well as a salad add in.

> Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.

Are you sure about that?

Because it's the first time ever I stumbled upon this argument.

The explanation I heard is that there are legit bacterial food safety concerns (salmonella and listeria, IIRC) that justify using nitrites even if they are by themself harmful, the benefit/risk ratio is simply favorable to nitrites.

Pretty sure. I make bacon and dabble with salumi. It's definitely not strictly a food safety issue. I sometimes put a pinch of pink salt in with my duck confit cure, and it comes out distinctively hammier. Nitric oxide interacts with myoglobin in ways that alter your taste perception; sort of the way I understand miracleberries make things taste sweeter (by cutting off your perception of bitterness), nitrites do to the metallic flavor compounds in meat.

It's both. Curing is a preservative technique and it gives bacon and ham the flavor people enjoy. Like a lot of food preservation techniques (jam, etc) curing was most likely developed for preservation first, and then people came to enjoy the flavor it gave.

This is partially true. The use celery extract or whatever they can get away with legally. Smoking is what gives bacon the flavor. Buy your cut of meat, season, and smoke it with a very low temp for long time, you have bacon. No nitrates.

No you won't. You'll have smoked pork. Nitrite curing is the difference between ham and pork, and is part of the source of American bacon's flavor. You can make or buy unsmoked bacon; it will still taste like bacon.

It is weird to me that people try to make an issue out of this, because it's not like the flavor change in cured meat is hard to miss. Just buy some pink salt! Corned beef tastes like corn beef because of nitrites.

This is false, buy some pork belly and smoke it. I've done it.

If there is a thing a reasonable person can do with pork belly, I have done it. I think you have the higher evidentiary burden here, regardless of our respective experience. You can check Ruhlman's Charcuterie and Salumi books, you can check AskCulinary, you can check the food Stack Exchange, you can just notice that literally every packaged bacon product, whether or not it claims to be cured, is in fact cured (usually with celery powder), or, of course, you can just take some sliced pork belly and make a 5% pink salt/salt mix and throw it in a zip in your fridge overnight and see.

I get that you like smoked pork belly. I do too. I don't even object to you calling it "bacon". All sorts of things that aren't American bacon are called bacon. But nitrites are absolutely part of the distinctive flavor of American bacon.

The whole thing is silly, because we can just point to ham and corned beef, two products where the debate doesn't even make sense; we only see it with bacon, and we only see it because vendors lie about whether their products are cured.

You're still getting the industrial levels of nitrates/nitrites. They just stuff it in as an extract from celery.

The problem isn't the curing, per se. In old school hand curing, almost all the nitrate/nitrite has reacted and is gone by the time you buy the meat.

The problem is the industrialization of the process. In order to not have to inspect the cured meat (as that would take people--the horror!), industry injects a massive amount of curing agents such that even when the meat is "fully cured" there is still a ton of it left in the meat itself.

That means they use celery powder as the source of nitrates, not that it has no nitrates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com