Expensive water

I'm tired of buying expensive water. I'm not talking about water rates or spending way over the odds on bottled water. One's an unfortunate necessity the other a choice. I'm talking about the water that I don't have a choice about paying way over the odds for. I love bacon. Every time a cook a delicious slice of the stuff I'm dismayed with how much actual bacon is left in the pan when it's done. A ridiculous amount of snotty water escapes leaving the rashers half their original size. All that water costs me the same as the bacon since the bacon is sold by weight.

Now I know meat has a natural amount of water in it but the fast curing process used for producing bacon adds a load more unnecessary expensive water that I end up paying for as if it were bacon.

This article has some interesting fact about that water: water in bacon...

I remember proper slices of bacon (this makes me sound old) that would shrink only slightly when cooked and had proper bite to them. Apparently natural pork is about 30% water, a fair amount of this is removed is you actually cure the bacon leaving you paying for mostly bacon and a dryer pan. "Modern processes" involve injecting a buttload of brine into bacon so greedy manufacturers can sell you less bacon for more cash faster than actually curing it.

A modern slice of bacon can be up to 50% water. So when I fry a a couple of rashers and have to literally spoon snotty water out of the pan so I don't end up poaching my bacon I'm pouring water away that has the same monetary value as the bacon left behind...apparently. I doubt I could bottle it and sell it by weight for the same price.

Now that link I posted suggests that there is something being done about this. Currently the brine injection process can add 10% more water whilst leaving all the original natural water in place too. This will hopefully be cut to 5%. This still leaves at least 35% water in a rasher and means it hasn't been properly cured but it's a step in the right direction.

What we seem to have forgotten in the UK is that the consumers have the ultimate power. If you are tired of damp snotty shrinking bacon, mostly-bread sausages, cardboard with a vinegary sauce slopped over it in the frozen section masquerading as one of any number of apparently different recipes despite all tasting the same, we could all stop buying it. They wont make it if you don't pay for it. Buy your bacon from a proper butcher that cures the product, puts meat in the sausages, maybe even cook a little more often yourself rather than heating up a plastic tray of slop. We could all get back to enjoying proper nutritious food again and above all bacon would return to how it used to be. I shouldn't have to scrap white stuff off my rashers before plopping them down on a couple of slices of buttered bread (yes butter not margarine...margarine is just whipped up cooking oil, you wouldn't pour it on your bread wet would you? so stopped spreading it on there) with a dash of ketchup or brown sauce. Perfect!

(p.s. brown sauce is made from a number of ingredients, including tomatoes, but has been marketed and commonly known as brown sauce...so that's fine. Tomato sauce/ketchup on the other hand is made chiefly of tomatoes and has always been known as tomato sauce...so why the hell have people started calling it "red sauce"? Have people en masse forgotten the word tomato? stop it! Call it tomato sauce or I'll assume you are an illiterate dumbass).