Bacon Is the Answer

No, not to everything. If I read one more, "Bacon makes everything better!" article or post, I'll . . . well, I'll curse silently to myself. But it will be vehement silent cursing. Bacon is good and it has its place, but its place is not in everything. Like mayonnaise. No. Please.

It does, however, have a place in meatloaf. Or rather, around meatloaf.

See, remember we don't eat bread? Well, without bread, it's hard to keep a meatloaf from falling apart into a big pile of loose meat when it's cut. So unappetizing. I've tried a lot of other things to glue the meat together, without success. But then I decided to wrap the whole thing in multiple strips of bacon, as recommended by America's Test Kitchen.

I did it originally for the fat it would add to the very lean, grass-fed ground beef we buy from the farm up the road. But it turns out that wrapping the whole thing in bacon makes a fatty meat swaddle (mmm, meat swaddle) that holds the meat in a nice compact bundle for cooking.

Plus, it tastes really good. As you might imagine. Bacon is definitely the answer to bread-less meatloaf. Just please keep it out of my mayonnaise.