Story

Grandad’s Background

I’m a retired Research & Development Chemical Engineer. I like to make things--for 34 years I created new ideas and new products for a consumer products company.  I especially love making food, eating food, and creating new recipes—and sharing them with family and friends.  Eating food should be a great personal and social experience.

In my career, my family and I have had incredible opportunities to live, work, and travel in the U.S, Europe, Central, and South America.  A key highlight of this was experiencing the foods and beverages from the different cultures we lived in.  I’ll never forget the first time I tasted schweinshaxe (roasted pork knuckle) in Germany, arepas con pernil & queso Guayanes (roasted pork leg and Guayanes cheese put into a baked corn meal patty) in Venezuela, or tacos al pastor (pork tacos) in Mexico (I could keep going…)—the flavors were new to me and incredible!  When we go on vacation I typically buy a cookbook from the region we’re visiting so I can recreate the great food when we get home.

The older I get, the more interested I am in how things used to be before all the  technology swept us away—imagine living in an “unplugged” world where self-sufficiency, simplicity, purity, trust, and authenticity rule.  And a time when real food was hand made with real local ingredients (and you knew the person who grew them) the old-fashioned way of our grandparents.

In the past several years I’ve started taking a step or two backwards by:

·      Growing organic vegetables and composting at home—a fresh, ripe home-grown tomato tastes so much better than a tomato grown on a distant commercial farm (in a different country?), picked before it’s ripe and shipped thousands of miles to our grocery store.  It takes effort to grow vegetables at home, but the experience is worth it.

·      Brewing beer with my son, and frequenting local breweries—I enjoy local micro-brewery beer so much more than beer brewed in large national breweries.  The incredible variety of beer styles and flavor characteristics turn every beer into an adventure and a conversation.  You pay more for a pint of micro-brewery beer, but the experience is worth it.

·      And yes, hand-crafting old-fashioned bacon.  Just like with micro-brewery beer, hand making small batches of bacon allows you to choose the type and quality of ingredients, and the flavors you like.  Hand-made bacon takes more time and effort than commercial bacon, but the experience is worth it.

If you sense a theme, you’re correct.

After I retired, the first thing I did was to attend a charcuterie class in Italy to learn the old-world methods for preparing meats such as sausages, salamis, capacolla, pancetta, etc. The second thing I did was to attend classes at Iowa State University’s top tier Meat Laboratory to learn modern production methods for sausages, salamis, and cured meats. So now I know the old and slow ways, and the new and fast ways of making meat products.  As I explained above, my heart is with making meat products the authentic “old fashioned and slow” way—it just tastes better to me. 

I decided making the best “old fashioned” bacon I can make would be a great starting point for my charcuterie career. I have been making bacon and refining my recipes for several years.  I’ve worked hard to identify the right flavors, thicknesses, sizes, and cuts to perfect Grandad’s Bacon.  I hand select the bacon slices to ensure every package has bacon with the right amount of lean vs. fat.  I hope you like Grandad’s Bacon as much as I do.

Finally, I want to give a shout out to my family and friends who had the tough and enviable job of taste testing and filling out questionnaires to help me create and perfect Grandad’s Bacon flavors that I’m honored to share with you now.