We have a passion for food quality. Our visit to Mount Vernon Farm, P.A. Bowen Farmstead, and Polyface last year sparked a passion in Stacy for sustainable farming. Healthy fats and protein from pastured animals have greatly improved Stacy’s digestive health. But it’s not cheap – so we began buying whole animals to make it more affordable. Committed to using every part of that animal, out of respect, brought us to where we are today.
The paleo community loves bacon. But pastured pork is the most affordable per-pound meat we could find. When your chest freezer is full with whole pastured pigs regularly, you learn to cook it all. And we mean ALL. Like most great partnership marriages, we found a happy place where Stacy’s passion for pastured pork met with Matt’s talent to cook it – and now, a book baby will be born.
Beyond Bacon pays homage to the humble hog by teaching you how to make more than a hundred recipes featuring cuts from the entire animal. While bacon might be the most popular part of the pig for those following the paleo diet, there is a plethora of other delicious and nutrient dense cuts to enjoy.
Pastured pork is rich in Omega 3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), the “good fats” our doctors want us to eat – not to mention high in Vitamin D, a deficiency for most Americans. Beyond Bacon breaks the myths behind this often eschewed meat and shows you how create delectable dishes that are grain-, legume-, dairy-, and refined sugar-free. Beyond Bacon allows you to improve your health and the environment by focusing on sustainable swine.
Don’t let the dried out pork of your youth scare you away! All the recipes in Beyond Bacon are elegant yet approachable, making it the ultimate cookbook for the foodie in you. You’ll find:
- Perfect Pork Chops, better than most restaurant steaks,
- Pho Soup with chitterling “noodles” and other healing and delicious soups and stews to stretch your dollar,
- the already-famous-among-recipe-testers Savory Bacon Jam fantastic with green apples or our Homestyle Biscuits
- sweet treats made luxuriously rich with lard, such as Grain-Free Pie Crust, Salted Mocha Biscotti,Fudge,and Maple Lard Scones,
- instructions on how to properly BBQ and smoke your meats as well asrecipes to make your own sauces,
- instructions for curing your own bacon, pancetta and even home-made sausage better than store bought,
- details on how to properly fry foods, like Corn Dogs with Sweet Potato Crisps and Sweet & Sour Pork, and
- an extensiveguide on how to make and cook with the nutrient dense essentials: pork stock and CLA-rich lard.
Beyond Bacon delivers mouth-watering photos for each delicious recipe. With a rustic aesthetic and appreciation for tradition, Beyond Bacon recreates the rich and wonderful food perfected generations ago, in a healthful way.
We realized that our photography wasn’t up to par with the quality we wanted for this book – a book we hope you feel worthy to gift upon the most questioning of your healthful lifestyle. To the father in law convinced he won’t be able to enjoy his weekly BBQ or the grandmother who will miss her pie crust, this book should satisfy their needs. And accordingly, we wanted the aesthetic and photographs to be drool-worthy. So, we hope that one of the best parts for you, other than the recipes themselves, will be the food photography, by Aimee Buxton.
That’s not to say that some of the most popular recipes on our websites aren’t featured in Beyond Bacon. In fact, we tried hard to make sure they were. But we did update the photographs for the book – so, if you click the photos below, you’ll be taken to the originally posted recipe that we transformed for Beyond Bacon. Hint Hint: If you want a sneak peak at Beyond Bacon Recipes, we’ve tagged them on our site…
Beyond Baconwas released on July 2, 2013 in all major bookstores!
Additionally, the book addresses many of the frequently asked questions. Won’t all this fat raise my cholesterol? What about the health recommendations to not eat pork? And the infamous, I’m too overwhelmed to even figure out how to order a whole animal or what to do with all the parts we’re not used to eating! We’ll teach you how to understand ordering a whole animal, our suggestions for finding a farmer, a breed of animal, the cuts you’ll need to order and how to cook any parts (including offal, bones and fat)that the deliciousness ofa pastured pig provides.
We’re incredibly honored that the wonderful, well-spoken, founding father of the sustainable farming movement – Mr. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm – is contributing a Foreword to Beyond Bacon. From the moment we saw Food, Inc. and subsequently visited Polyface Farm, his farm and farming practices have been an inspiration for us to focus on humanely and sustainably raised animals, and we have hopes for showing you all that it doesn’t have to be expensive or overly complicated!
Beyond Baconwas released as a hardback on July 2, 2013 and features paleo (grain-, legume-, dairy-, refined sugar-free) recipes from the whole hog. Honestly, if you don’t get an opportunity to eat the smoked pork belly, make your own sausage, and make The Best Brownies topped with Frozen Custard and Salted Caramel Sauce your lifemay, in fact, beincomplete.
