Instructions: Pork belly futures are looking pretty terrific. Oh, who knows how theyre doing on the commodities market; the really bright future is in the popular craving for bacon.

You can see it not only in your own kitchen and in high-end restaurants but in the variety of old-fashioned, smokehouse-style bacons now in specialty food markets. Our craving for the tasty strips is based strictly on taste; it doesnt get any nods for its health benefits.

Compare bacon with its classic sidekick, eggs - which got a reprieve from the nutrition community when research showed that eating a couple each week was fine. Even chocolate has gotten good marks lately for its alleged anti-oxidant benefits.

Bacon, on the other hand, is strictly an indulgence, with enough obvious fat that the eater cant begin to pretend that its good for him. But hey, who cares? If loving it is wrong, plenty of Americans dont want to be right, seeing as how the National Pork Board reports that bacon sales increased 45 percent from 1999 to 2000, the latest figures available.

The majority of those sales are for the more common breakfast strips, which turn up in diner breakfasts, as fast-food burger embellishments and in home kitchens.

But look for more of the traditionally crafted bacons to appear in specialty markets, as the appreciation develops for a good, thick strip of bacon beautifully proportioned between tender, slow-smoked meat and lines of flavorful fat.

"Most people think of bacon as sliced paper-thin and, when you cook it up, you end up with a small piece and a large puddle of grease," said John Duyn, owner of the Carlton Packing Co. near Portland, a small producer of old-fashioned bacon.

The smokehouse-style meats are a long way from mass-produced bacon. And for that reason, serious bacon lovers as well as restaurant chefs pay close to $12 a pound for such brands as Carltons or Nueskes instead of $5.40 for Oscar Mayer.

Around 1,000 people have joined the bacon-of-the-month club at The Grateful Palate, a food and wine mail-order business based in Oxnard, according to owner Dan Philips.

Making bacon is a fairly standard process. Meat from the underside, or belly, of the pig is cured and seasoned with salt, sugar and perhaps spices. Smoking bacon gives it additional flavor. Nitrites, which also give bacon its reddish color, can serve the same purpose as salt during the curing, and brine or smoke flavors can be injected into the meat to speed up the process.

What sets many of the specialty bacons apart are pigs fed a special diet of corn or organic grains. Some farms raise pigs without antibiotics or hormones.

Old-fashioned methods put the meat through a curing that takes around 10 days, as opposed to a 24-hour cure, expedited by pressurized brines, commonly used by large food companies.

The appeal of bacon is pretty widespread. Try to think of anything else that smells so great when it is crackling in the pan, that tastes so good next to a stack of pancakes and warm syrup, or that provides such an essential layer to a stacked sandwich.

With a number of superior products now on the market, bacon becomes a prize ingredient in high-end dishes instead of simply a guilty pleasure more at home on a diners griddle. Its a bold flavor that just adds dimension to any dish.

Yet we cant ignore bacons welcome role at the breakfast table.

Writer Cheryl Alters Jamison, author with her husband, Bill, of "A Real American Breakfast," says the idea of "sweet and meat seems to be an American notion."
Bacon with pancakes or waffles with maple syrup are natural pairings, especially with the "natural sweetness and nuttiness of the meat," said Jamison.

Its not unusual to get batty about bacon. This particular part of the pig thrives precisely because of that kind of devotion.

OK, some people might consider Sara Perrys enthusiasm extreme. The Portland author not only came up with dozens of recipes while writing her newest cookbook, "Everything Tastes Better with Bacon," she even delved into desserts, providing recipes for bacon brittle ("Sort of like peanut brittle") and an apple pie with cheese and bacon bits in the crust.

"I realized that bacon is one of those ingredients you use as a food, like at breakfast, but also is a wonderful flavoring, used as one would use a good spice or wine," Perry said of the research she did for the book, to be published in July by Chronicle. "Besides its enticing flavor, it has irresistible crunch, so it adds another sensation." Just ask the man whose love for the piggy product is so great that he had an artist design a silk-screened, bacon-themed poster: "We sell a lot of food products that are popular," Philips of The Grateful Palate said, "but bacon is the one thing that everyone loves." It just gives you a warm feeling inside, doesnt it?

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