Edit – everyone seems to be confused, I’m not asking for where to get real bacon. I’m wondering why Japanese people think the stuff that’s everywhere here is ok?
Saving grace in the odd foreign food shops sometimes.
[deleted]
They grew up on ham and spam.
Ask for Kamakura
Fr bro Same with sausages. I need a good British sausage. They have no idea what they’re doing. I don’t want American fake sausages. Anyone know where I can find good shit?
The nitrates required to create preserved meats such as bacon and cold cuts are tightly controlled in Japan as they can also be used in explosives. Supposedly, to commercially purchase these materials is difficult.
I have been told repeatedly that this is one of the reasons you can’t readily find American style bacon or lunch meats here. Whether that is true or not, I am not sure, but there is an issue with finding those items here with the same flavor/quality that I grew up with.
It’s so weird like a lot of meat is great here, but bacon and sausages are ridiculously offensive.
Bacon is just like a plastic wet soggy flap that clearly contains zero meat and belongs in a lab. You cook it up to crisp and it shrinks to the size of a pill.
The sausages are just again stupidly fake tasting, explode in your mouth and release lava. Again no meat just a chemical weapon.
Chicken is great though.
Kitano-Ace.
They are not proper strips but odds and ends. They are thick, though, and get crispy before they burn.
Japanese bacon for the Japanese palette, I guess……A crime against pork bellies in its own regard. I know it always comes up here but good cheese and good butter, oh what I would give!!!
You mean you don’t enjoy the razor thin slices that I personally can never seem to separate from each other
Wait until someone tells you about most of the other western food.
I recently had Japanese smoked bacon. It tasted like a war crime.
Step 1: Go to Hanamasa or something like that.
Step 2: Buy a pork belly block. 1-1.5kg.
Step 3: Rub it all over with a mixture of salt and other stuff. You could use curing salt if you want to make it last longer, but normal salt is fine too if you just need it to last for a week or so. Really make sure to get the rub in all the nooks and crannies.
Step 4: Put it in a ziplock in the fridge for a few days. Pour out the extra liquid every day. Rub on more salt if you need to.
Step 5: Soak it in water for a few hours to get the worst of the saltiness out of the skin. Dry off with a paper towel.
Step 6: Let it sit in the fridge out in the open (not in the Ziplock) for a couple days. Put it on a grate, or propped up on some chopsticks, so the air can get all around it.
Step 7 (optional, but recommended): Smoke for a couple hours.
There you go, now you have bacon.
Honestly I just treat it like pork belly ham rather than bacon. Brown it and put it in pasta etc. It is boiled IIRC. Given the way Japanese cook stuff, they might not be down for all that bacon fat.
Personally the most American style bacon I’ve had here is from Seiyu.
I remember hearing that they cant sell uncooked pork products. So everything has to be precooked/prepared, then packaged.
That’s why bacon looks more like ham, and same for sausages. You could literally eat any pork product out of the pack and be completely fine.
You can still buy raw, minced pork and beef. You could make your own sausages. Noting we can do about bacon. Maybe costco? But I dont think they would be allowed to sell uncooked bacon in Japan.
Closest thing to actual bacon would just be sliced pork (which is raw) but its not really bacon. Still needs to be cured.
It’s like folks in this subreddit shop only at their neighborhood mini market and never try to find the right places to buy things. Seijo ishii has proper smoked bacon. Most good butcher shops do too. It’s like Europeans bitching about the bread in the US because they only buy it from the supermarket rather than going to a bakery.
I recommend Sendagi koshizuka if you happen to be around one of their shops (their corned beef is also really great).
I know that realistically people just come here to bitch about Japan and not to ask for recommendations (because you could have searched this subreddit for good bacon recommendations), but this type of post is just so tired and lame.
This is one of the few things I truly miss. My family in the US asked me what I wanted on my brief trip back to the states last year and I literally told them “Fry me up a whole pound of bacon, as crisp as you can get it, and enjoy it with me. The bacon in Japan is trash”.
I should follow this thread for when I move to Kanto and have more international stores and different supermarket chains available. Otherwise I’m too hesitant to buy bacon. Getting a bad batch would just make me too sad. Glad I was warned on Reddit before arriving in Japan because it is just as bad as they say.
The chemicals that make American bacon crispy are not allowed here… source: my friend used to run a burger joint Fatz’s
This is why The Meat Guy makes absolute tons of money (or at least did, not sure if he’s still in business). All of us Gaijin who need proper meat just throw our cash at him.
Kami bless him though, he delivers.
I wonder if it’s somehow related to the confusing German term of ‘Schinken Speck’ which is ‘ham bacon’. It’s a thicker version of ham (from the hind legs), but actually not bacon (from the belly). Same in Dutch by the way. Maybe the concept was imported to Japan and that’s why Japanese bacon is actually often ham?!?
Same with cheese. I’m sure in Hokkaido they have similar conditions to the UK. Made some damned mature cheddar ffs.
I had diarrhea everytime I ate sausage from Gyomu Supa. Even though I always made sure it was properly cooked.
Go to a Costco. You can get good bacon/sausages there.
​
Niku no Hanamasa has some decent sausages. They also have a lot of awful sausages but they have a 500g pack of Pork Sausages for about 900 yen for professional use that are great.
For smaller sausages, Shau Essen are the only ones I’ve found that are decent.
For Bacon, Aeon Mybasket now sells 210g blocks of bacon that you cut yourself for about 370 yen. Not amazing, but decent. Or again, Niku no Hanamasa.
i mean you say this like Brits and Americans don’t have screaming matches on here every day about what “real” bacon is
The (pre-cooked, but still good) bacon from Costco in Japan is pretty decent. It’s, as we’d say in the UK, though, streaky bacon. So don’t expect back bacon.
I have legit forgotten what good bacon and cheese even taste like.
I don’t like US streaky bacon, so it seems fine to me…
It’s the curing process that *makes* bacon, or ham. That’s not a thing for Japanese food.
Arabiki tastes awful after so many times.
Not as bad as Maple breakfast sausage though (which has a medicine taste)
Japanese Bacon: Approximatingly “bacon-shapped” ham. The Japanese don’t seems to appreciate the heavily smoked meat flavor. (which I find ironic because they love 焼肉) This is a situation where someone saw bacon, learned that it was pork and stopped reading. From there they extrapolated the rest. But primarily it is a lack of smokehouses problem.
Japanese Sausages: They love the “pop” of the sausage skin. Apparently, sausage companies did a huge amount of market research in this area and theat was the most important thing. This is supposed to replicate the thicker sausage skins of “Deutsch” sausages. The concept of flavor has of course been completely lost on the Japanese just like for every other western-style food.
31 comments
That’s a good question…
Saving grace in the odd foreign food shops sometimes.
[deleted]
They grew up on ham and spam.
Ask for Kamakura
Fr bro
Same with sausages. I need a good British sausage. They have no idea what they’re doing. I don’t want American fake sausages. Anyone know where I can find good shit?
The nitrates required to create preserved meats such as bacon and cold cuts are tightly controlled in Japan as they can also be used in explosives. Supposedly, to commercially purchase these materials is difficult.
I have been told repeatedly that this is one of the reasons you can’t readily find American style bacon or lunch meats here. Whether that is true or not, I am not sure, but there is an issue with finding those items here with the same flavor/quality that I grew up with.
It’s so weird like a lot of meat is great here, but bacon and sausages are ridiculously offensive.
Bacon is just like a plastic wet soggy flap that clearly contains zero meat and belongs in a lab. You cook it up to crisp and it shrinks to the size of a pill.
The sausages are just again stupidly fake tasting, explode in your mouth and release lava. Again no meat just a chemical weapon.
Chicken is great though.
Kitano-Ace.
They are not proper strips but odds and ends. They are thick, though, and get crispy before they burn.
Japanese bacon for the Japanese palette, I guess……A crime against pork bellies in its own regard. I know it always comes up here but good cheese and good butter, oh what I would give!!!
You mean you don’t enjoy the razor thin slices that I personally can never seem to separate from each other
Wait until someone tells you about most of the other western food.
I recently had Japanese smoked bacon. It tasted like a war crime.
Step 1: Go to Hanamasa or something like that.
Step 2: Buy a pork belly block. 1-1.5kg.
Step 3: Rub it all over with a mixture of salt and other stuff. You could use curing salt if you want to make it last longer, but normal salt is fine too if you just need it to last for a week or so. Really make sure to get the rub in all the nooks and crannies.
Step 4: Put it in a ziplock in the fridge for a few days. Pour out the extra liquid every day. Rub on more salt if you need to.
Step 5: Soak it in water for a few hours to get the worst of the saltiness out of the skin. Dry off with a paper towel.
Step 6: Let it sit in the fridge out in the open (not in the Ziplock) for a couple days. Put it on a grate, or propped up on some chopsticks, so the air can get all around it.
Step 7 (optional, but recommended): Smoke for a couple hours.
There you go, now you have bacon.
Honestly I just treat it like pork belly ham rather than bacon. Brown it and put it in pasta etc. It is boiled IIRC. Given the way Japanese cook stuff, they might not be down for all that bacon fat.
Personally the most American style bacon I’ve had here is from Seiyu.
I remember hearing that they cant sell uncooked pork products. So everything has to be precooked/prepared, then packaged.
That’s why bacon looks more like ham, and same for sausages. You could literally eat any pork product out of the pack and be completely fine.
You can still buy raw, minced pork and beef. You could make your own sausages. Noting we can do about bacon. Maybe costco? But I dont think they would be allowed to sell uncooked bacon in Japan.
Closest thing to actual bacon would just be sliced pork (which is raw) but its not really bacon. Still needs to be cured.
It’s like folks in this subreddit shop only at their neighborhood mini market and never try to find the right places to buy things. Seijo ishii has proper smoked bacon. Most good butcher shops do too. It’s like Europeans bitching about the bread in the US because they only buy it from the supermarket rather than going to a bakery.
I recommend Sendagi koshizuka if you happen to be around one of their shops (their corned beef is also really great).
I know that realistically people just come here to bitch about Japan and not to ask for recommendations (because you could have searched this subreddit for good bacon recommendations), but this type of post is just so tired and lame.
This is one of the few things I truly miss. My family in the US asked me what I wanted on my brief trip back to the states last year and I literally told them “Fry me up a whole pound of bacon, as crisp as you can get it, and enjoy it with me. The bacon in Japan is trash”.
I should follow this thread for when I move to Kanto and have more international stores and different supermarket chains available. Otherwise I’m too hesitant to buy bacon. Getting a bad batch would just make me too sad. Glad I was warned on Reddit before arriving in Japan because it is just as bad as they say.
The chemicals that make American bacon crispy are not allowed here… source: my friend used to run a burger joint Fatz’s
do you only shop at convenience store for bacon？
hokkaido farms have proper bacon and sausages
and there is this at expensive department store
[https://www.kamakuraham-tomioka.co.jp/about/nunomaki/](https://www.kamakuraham-tomioka.co.jp/about/nunomaki/)
This is why The Meat Guy makes absolute tons of money (or at least did, not sure if he’s still in business). All of us Gaijin who need proper meat just throw our cash at him.
Kami bless him though, he delivers.
I wonder if it’s somehow related to the confusing German term of ‘Schinken Speck’ which is ‘ham bacon’. It’s a thicker version of ham (from the hind legs), but actually not bacon (from the belly).
Same in Dutch by the way.
Maybe the concept was imported to Japan and that’s why Japanese bacon is actually often ham?!?
Same with cheese. I’m sure in Hokkaido they have similar conditions to the UK. Made some damned mature cheddar ffs.
I had diarrhea everytime I ate sausage from Gyomu Supa. Even though I always made sure it was properly cooked.
Go to a Costco. You can get good bacon/sausages there.
​
Niku no Hanamasa has some decent sausages. They also have a lot of awful sausages but they have a 500g pack of Pork Sausages for about 900 yen for professional use that are great.
For smaller sausages, Shau Essen are the only ones I’ve found that are decent.
For Bacon, Aeon Mybasket now sells 210g blocks of bacon that you cut yourself for about 370 yen. Not amazing, but decent. Or again, Niku no Hanamasa.
i mean you say this like Brits and Americans don’t have screaming matches on here every day about what “real” bacon is
The (pre-cooked, but still good) bacon from Costco in Japan is pretty decent. It’s, as we’d say in the UK, though, streaky bacon. So don’t expect back bacon.
I have legit forgotten what good bacon and cheese even taste like.
I don’t like US streaky bacon, so it seems fine to me…
It’s the curing process that *makes* bacon, or ham. That’s not a thing for Japanese food.
Arabiki tastes awful after so many times.
Not as bad as Maple breakfast sausage though (which has a medicine taste)
Japanese Bacon: Approximatingly “bacon-shapped” ham. The Japanese don’t seems to appreciate the heavily smoked meat flavor. (which I find ironic because they love 焼肉) This is a situation where someone saw bacon, learned that it was pork and stopped reading. From there they extrapolated the rest. But primarily it is a lack of smokehouses problem.
Japanese Sausages: They love the “pop” of the sausage skin. Apparently, sausage companies did a huge amount of market research in this area and theat was the most important thing. This is supposed to replicate the thicker sausage skins of “Deutsch” sausages. The concept of flavor has of course been completely lost on the Japanese just like for every other western-style food.