I live in a small town and like to cook. Local stores have limited selections and nothing most folks would view as exotic. It's not unusual for me to acquire ingredients while travelling. I have a package of pancetta back in my Hampton Inn fridge that I need to get home without spoiling. I will keep it refrigerated until 2:00 when I head for the airport. I will be home 10 hours later. Any safety precautions necessary? Better to pack with checked luggage or may I carry it on?

Edited to add that I am truly "bringing home the bacon" this week.

I bring home tomato sauce from my Grandma's every time I go - freeze, wrap in newspaper. Seems to work great!

I go camping with a package of bacon all the time. Starts out frozen and we generally go through it in three days w/o it being refridgerated. Always been fine.

I believe "american" bacon has more nitrates/preservatives in it than pancetta.

on a side note, mmmmmm pancetta, just made pasta carbonara the other night.

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I don't know really. If it was good, old American bacon that is both salt-cured and smoked as opposed to pancetta, which is only salt-cured, I would think it would travel fine as long as it was properly refrigerated/frozen and packaged. But then, pancetta has less surface to rind area than regular bacon, so you may get along just fine, especially if you aren't going to make pancetta tartare.

Knowing that I always cook pork to the recommended temperature, especially in this case, and provided it doesn't have to last more than two weeks in the refrigerator once it gets home, I would probably give this a try if I was forced to make my porcine purchases that far from home. Would much prefer to buy locally; however, I also realize that it may be a pancetta-free zone in your neck of the woods.

Sincerely,


William R. Sanders
Customer Service Coordinator
Starwood Preferred Services

[email protected]

I would say keep it as cold as possible until flight time then put in your checked bag.

If I was going the other direction, I'm pretty sure a box of grits would hold up just fine. We're pretty much an everything-free zone.

I'm going to hope that freezing doesn't harm it, and it will be used this weekend. No pancetta tartare - I can't imagine it. I grew up hearing that I would contract trichinosis from raw pork, and true or not, I cook all pork, hamburger, chicken and spinach to recommended temperatures.

Isn't the hold a little colder than the cabin?

I've taken bacon, frozen on a trip over 18 hrs -- tasted just fine. It was a long trip with an overnight layover on our way from the US somewhere, if you get my meaning.
I used hotel ice since the hotel didn't have fridges in the rooms and that worked very well.
It arrived thawed, but still quite cold.

PM me if you want specifics.

If you can't get your hands on an insulted travel pack (i.e. lunch kit), I think you will do fine with it in your checked bag this time of year. I would keep it as cold as possible until you go to the airport. I've done stranger things.

I'm no cook, but wasn't bacon basically invented as a way to preserve pig back in the no refrigeration days?

Pretty much so, yes...but bacon is smoked in addition to being salt-cured. This is pancetta, which is not smoked, so a slightly different animal, not to mention a slightly different part of the animal. Pancetta is made strictly from the belly, while bacon - as we know it - is from the belly and the sides of the pig.

However, even in the days of no refrigeration, my great-grandparents used to wrap the bacon tightly and keep it in a bucket floating at the bottom of a deep well. It was around 54 degrees down there even on the hottest of days.

Sincerely,


William R. Sanders
Customer Service Coordinator
Starwood Preferred Services

[email protected]

When I was a kid, my folks used to freeze packets of Oscar Meyer bacon and pack it in check-in luggage. We took it with us on vacation from Anchorage to Hong Kong. We stayed at my uncle's condo/flat and he loved bacon. Back in the 1980's, we couldn't find American style bacon at any stores (or street vendor carts...yuk... ) in HKG.


Steve

I've seen cops travel on airplanes just fine.

That's all I ever did when bring rashers of bacon from home to the Caribbean or Brasil to give the expats a proper Irish fry-up. Those packets were always vacuum packed so I didn't have any concerns and I'm still around.

I think people were tougher in the old days. And their foods weren't exposed to the same processing that we have today. 54 degrees is NOT a safe temp -- the line is 40 degrees in the food safety world. Freezing the bacon and then letting it "defrost" over the course of the trip is basically the same as defrosting in your sink instead of the refrigerator -- a very dangerous practice.

The people of HomeFoodSafety.org say that bacon lasts 3-4 days after opening the package when refrigerated. And while I've frozen all sorts of meats and taken them on backpacking trips with no ill effects, I don't think anyone should suggest that this is a safe practice.

If you can't keep it on ice for the entire trip, then you probably should just try to buy it on the other end from the Bacon of the Month Club

I put it in my hotel freezer, but it was merely cold when I removed it in the morning. It then spent 6 hours in a work freezer and was solid when removed. It was still cold when I got my checked bag off the carousel after spending time in some (hopefully) cool/cold places (CVG was brisk last night).

I'll cook with it tomorrow. If you never see another post from me on FT, you'll know something went wrong.