Anavery Farms Bacon

Anavery Fine Foods has 78 beautiful acres in Traverse City, Michigan, and they use rotational grazing and other sustainable practices to keep the soil healthy and the animals happy. Heritage breed pigs have room to roam around and are raised humanely without any added hormones or antibiotics.

For their bacon, the pork bellies are wet-cured with brown sugar and maple sugar before they’re smoked, so it’s sweet, porky, and mildly smoky. I put this bacon through the tasting gauntlet: I pan-fried it, oven-roasted it, put it on sandwiches, stirred it into pasta… the list goes on. In every dish, the classic pork flavor stands out without being overpowering.