Dave, congrats on doing such a fine job on your first try at bacon! Hopefully the ham and Canadian bacon will be a big success too.

I neglected to mention that I did make canadian bacon last time, too, and it was tremendous. I only used about 1/4 of the loins for canadian bacon, though so I don't have much. Next time I'll use it all instead of "wasting" them as pork roasts.

texaskitty111, I bet I'd have no trouble selling this stuff. In fact my neighbor asked me several times if I'd sell him some. Like everytime we talked he asked again. He finally gave up asking but I do still give him a package from time to time. I don't think I'd ever want to go into business selling this because it's so labor intensive to make.

Dave, maybe take us through the bacon making process next time, you know we love seeing how things are done on the ranch.

Sure, I'll take some photos next time and will give a bit of a writeup.

Dave - You know, we could probably make our own decisions on just how good this bacon is if we had a sample...

(my favorite shirt: )

Pretty cure.

On the red image above, the best bacon is made from the upper belly part, even the parts that would typically be harvested for ribs. And the graphic should show "canadian bacon" for the loins.

/pedantic

Was just in south Texas last week (San Antonio / Corpus Christi). I can definitely see why growing & harvesting a cow would be a LOT better than purchasing meat at the store. I didn't go into a HEB store, but the Walmart & Center Market I went into.. yikes! I thought beef was expensive here in Colorado, but it's literally twice as expensive there! Holy cow! Literally! Bought a standing rib roast for Christmas dinner and that was $19.99/lb!! And only reason why I got that one was because the cheaper cuts of meat for rib eyes had almost no marbling at all, but you could definitely see the gristle in it!! And that was $14.99/lb! So the slightly-less-than-3 pounds of roast (which was sliced into steaks) ran $60!!

Yikes!

I've never seen beef at that price but standing rib roasts are always going to be pretty pricey.

dave said:I've never seen beef at that price but standing rib roasts are always going to be pretty pricey.

And even more so around the holidays...

Dave - I was at a Walmart somewhere in San Antonio & the bone in ribeyes were $12.99/lb!! My jaw dropped! I figured that, with it being Texas & cow country & the fact that Texans seem to eat a lot more beef than in some other states, it'd be a lot cheaper. I just bought an absolutely beautiful standing rib roast here at King Soopers (a Kroger grocery here in Colorado) for $5.99/lb last week & sliced it into steaks myself (steaks were $6.99/lb?).

Super Nazi cows?

http://www.independent.co.uk/e...

http://www.cattlerange.com/cat...
As you can see Texas is the leading state in beef production. Wouldn't you think it would be cheaper there? I used to go to Oklahoma every summer for a month to help out a friend how had a horse ranch there, and I was alway amazed at the higher prices for groceries in general down that way. I could never figure out that things that grew down there were higher priced then they were up here when they needed to be shipped here.

When i moved from CA to TX ten years ago, i was amazed how cheap groceries were in TX. Its all what you're used to. My main complaint here is i can't get certain items here i can find anywhere in CA
1. Gallo dry salami
2. Beef ribs
3. Corned beef with the spices on it instead of in a tiny packet
It has long ben my opinion that the beef here is shipped to another state, and the hogs shipped here.

I don't know anything about this subject but I suspect that the cows raised in Texas are taken to other places for finishing. When I go watch the sale on Saturdays they sell around a thousand cows each week out of my county. Well, where are they going? We don't have a lot of slaughter houses around here so I don't think the ground beef in our Wal-Mart here came from local grown cows. I suspect they are taken up north in 18 wheelers and processed there. That's just my best guess.

Texaskitty, I feel your pain -- there are so many things where I live that we can't get... shoot, things we've never even heard of !

Dave -- I don't think the ground beef in Walmart comes from cows from anywhere in the US.

I was pretty shocked today to see that chuck steak was $6.09/lb -- more than sirloin... ???

I thought you were just saying that Walmart's ground beef did not actually come from cows... Hmmm, maybe!

I do buy the frozen lean burgers at WM, but after buying the ground beef in a roll..............never again. It was SO slimey. The burgers aren't like that.

Pink slime?