Makin’ bacon

Is there a culinary pie in Sacramento in which Old Soul Co. does not have a finger? Well, actual pie, I guess. From coffee and pastries, they’ve expanded to breads (love the focaccia), lunch, pizza dough and more. The “more” I tried most recently? Bacon, cured in-house from Bledsoe Pork. It’s $10 per pound, meaning a mere sawbuck gets you a plastic-wrapped slab of delicious pork belly. The slab has firm creamy-white fat and hefty stripes of pale-pink meat. The flavor is sweetly salty but porkier and richer than your average bacon. It’s not sliced, so it’s great cut into chunks to flavor soups (try it with lentils) or lardons to fry up and garnish things (or, um, pop in your mouth). I can also vouch for it served in the traditional bacon manner: I got out my biggest knife, sliced it thinly, and cooked it up to go with eggs and pancakes. You know what else that’s good with? Coffee! Hey, I think Old Soul has that, too.