How to Turn Bacon Into Crispy, Chewy Joy Nuggets

I’m not a big believer in daily affirmations, or “life mottos,” but one phrase I firmly believe in is that “bacon makes everything better.”  Beyond rashers of bacon fried up for breakfast, there are so many ways to use cured pork belly, whether the smoked kind we tend to find in the States or the salted type more common in France and Italy. Chopped into small pieces and browned to a crisp, it provides fat and flavor to soups and stews, and it’s a welcome garnish on salads, pastas, and roasted vegetable dishes (I’m looking at you, Brussel sprouts). 

When you’re cooking French food, you’ll often encounter the term lardon, which describes cured pork belly that’s typically sliced into matchsticks or batons and rendered until each morsel is crisp while still retaining a bit of chew.

Lardons are a key ingredient in a classic frisée salad, coq au vin, beef Bourguignon, and tarte flambée, to name a few. While seemingly simple (I mean, they’re just sliced and cooked little fatty pork nuggets after all!), there is a fair amount of technique to making great lardons that are crispy on the outside, meaty on the inside, and maintain their shape in a way that oven- or classic pan-fried methods just can’t quite manage.

Here’s some insight into selecting the right meat—whether you have access to real-deal French cured pork belly or not—and how to properly cut and cook lardons at home.

The Best Cuts to Use for Lardons

Ventrèche: In France, lardons are most often sliced from ventrèche, the French cut of pork belly that’s cured with salt and fashioned into a roll; it is traditionally not smoked. Ventrèche can be hard to find in the United States, but if you’re committed to using it, you can order it online from purveyors such as D’Artagnan.

The good news, though, is that you don’t have to use ventrèche to make lardons. Both pancetta and bacon can work well as substitutes.

Pancetta: Just like American bacon, pancetta is cut from the belly of the pig, but unlike bacon, pancetta is very rarely smoked. It’s also saltier and more heavily cured than American bacon, which gives it a more strongly aged flavor than bacon has—you can almost taste the weeks or months it spent hanging in the curing room.

Because it isn’t usually smoked, pancetta makes a more faithful ventrèche replacement than bacon. Italian pancetta, however, is frequently dried longer than ventrèche, which means it often has an even more concentrated saltiness (and ventrèche is already plenty salty on its own). While you could take the time to soak your pancetta in water for one to four hours to leach out excess salt before cutting and cooking, I find this to be too much of an inconvenience most of the time. Instead, I find that it suffices to be mindful when seasoning a dish in which any cured pork product (but especially pancetta) is used—go lighter on the salt elsewhere to keep the overall flavor balanced and delicious. 

Pancetta comes in two forms: arrotolata and tesa. The arrotolata pancetta comes rolled tightly into a log, while the tesa comes in a slab similar in appearance to bacon. Along with the salt used to cure pancetta, the meat is generally seasoned with a mixture of garlic and spices like black pepper, juniper berries, and thyme. Both slab and rolled pancetta will work well in this recipe, though you may have to use different cutting methods to turn each into even lardons, which I explain in the recipe and notes below.

Bacon: Bacon is the easiest option for making lardons in the US, though its smoked flavor is also the furthest from that of ventrèche. That doesn’t mean it’s a worse option—that smokiness is often undeniably delicious in dishes that call for lardons—but it’s the least faithful to tradition. Still, if that’s all you can get, or if you simply prefer it, you should proceed knowing it’s a good option.

Relatively similar to pancetta in fat content, the bacon we’re familiar with in the States is cured (most often with salt and sugar) and lightly smoked, guaranteeing sweet, smoky, salty, and fatty flavor in every bite. If using bacon, I strongly encourage you to start with slab bacon so that you can cut it into batons that are thicker than pre-sliced bacon will allow. In a pinch, though, you can use pre-sliced bacon, just make sure to use one that’s thick-cut to avoid overly thin and crispy strips that have none of the fatty chew of a good lardon.

Key Steps for Cooking Lardons

Freeze briefly for easier slicing. As our editorial director Daniel Grizter points out in his guide to cutting up bacon, dicing room-temperature bacon can be a major challenge. Slippery when even slightly warm, the wide striations of fat in bacon, pancetta, or any pork belly cut will slither and squirm beneath the blade if you try to slice at room temperature. A sharp knife will help to get the job done, so long as you work fast and it stays cold, but dilly dally at all and you’re likely to end up with a ragged pile of torn, shredded, mashed bits rather than the nice pile of evenly cut matchsticks were aiming for.

Daniel points out that this happens because animal fats are a complex mixture of different saturated and unsaturated fats, and thus melt over a wide temperature range. Some of this fat will begin to liquefy even at room temperature. Touch it with your fingers as you dice it and your body heat warms it up, partially melting it and creating a slippery texture, making it more and more difficult to work with.

The solution? Keep it cold. The best way to ensure this is by freezing the pork belly (whether you use ventrèche, pancetta, or bacon, slab or sliced). Freeze it until firm, but not fully frozen; if you freeze it too long it’ll be like trying to push a knife through a block of ice. Even just 15 to 30 minutes in the freezer is enough to give the pork a deep chill before slicing.

Start in a cold pan. Well, not literally cold, but a room temperature skillet. By heating the pork up slowly with the skillet, you’ll render the fat more gently and evenly, and avoid the risk of lardons that brown deeply before enough fat has rendered from the interior. 

Add a bit of water. You could try rendering the pork in a dry skillet, but air is a notoriously poor conductor of heat, which means that only the part of the pork in direct contact with the pan is really heating up. It’s better to start with a small amount of water in the skillet—just enough to gently wet and steam the lardons during their initial phase of cooking. This will kick off a much more even rendering of fat. After that, the water will evaporate and the lardons will fry and brown in the ample rendered fat until browned and crispy.

Render slowly and watch closely. By cooking the pork over medium-low heat, you once again ensure the fat renders before the exterior of the lardons are well browned.  Well made lardons should be deep golden all over and retain a bit of chew, with translucent morsels of tender fat still clinging to the meat. Cut and cooked this way, they pair perfectly with, well, pretty much everything.