Maxbauer’s Legendary Homemade Bacon

Tastemaker

By Lynda Wheatley | May 29, 2021

(Vegan, vegetarian, and parental advisory: The following write-up contains words, imagery, and soft-core-porn-like references to bacon.)

There’s bacon, and then there’s bacon. And then somewhere up on a pedestal of meat in heaven, we suspect, there’s Maxbauer’s Legendary Homemade Bacon ($14 per 1-pound package). It’s smoked and cured in-house, with minimal ingredients, and if its flavor and texture could be summarized in a word, it would not be a word; it would be a soft moan punctuated with several sharp gasps followed by a cigarette.

Maxbauer’s Legendary Homemade is infinitely satisfying in both flavor and texture — a generous, not hostile, level of saltiness, with only the merest microscopic hint of tantalizing sweet; enough fat to ensure a gratifying, not explosive, bacon-crumb-in-your-eye crunch; and with exactly the consistent width of meat ribbon that’ll spare you major package-by-package scrutiny time.

We got ours at Maxbauer’s newly opened space, The Butcher’s Block, at 425 West South Airport Rd. Although Mark the butcher’s flagship Union Street location is miles closer to our home, The Butcher’s Block proved more than worth the trek. A veritable meat emporium, it’s as though the Union Street market’s humble section of hand-butchered pre-packaged meat (e.g., dinner, when you have no idea what to make for dinner) got exposed to gamma rays, burst from its downtown bricks, and became the Incredible Meat Hulk, only not green and with more spacious parking.

Why so far out of town? Some point to the aforementioned parking ease; others to the prohibitive price of non-outskirts real estate. We suspect it has more to do with The Butcher’s Block’s proximity to Costco, which sits a bone’s throw east and sells both chest and upright freezers. Learn more here.