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Bacon at its bacon-est: All that it can be

Next to the snow heaped at the curb along Ninth Street last week, the sidewalk sign offered a somewhat mixed message.

Next to the snow heaped at the curb along Ninth Street last week, the sidewalk sign offered a somewhat mixed message.

It was in front of DiBruno Bros., the venerable cheesery; the homey Italian Market original, not its spiffier Chestnut Street incarnation.

The hand-lettering said, as you might expect: "Stilton: Why wouldn't you get some?", and "Tuma Persa! Sharp, Sharp, Sharp, Sharp."

But there were also interlinear - subliminal? - notes: "Is it Bacon Day?" and "Baconnaise. . . . Yeah, bacon-flavored mayonnaise!"

That subtext was largely the result, it turns out, of an obsession that has gripped Ezekial Ferguson, the immensely charming cheese specialist at the Ninth Street shop: Last summer, he had a bit of a religious experience.

(He's Ezekial John, by the way; his brother is Zachariah James, their names informed by their parents' proclivity for biblical references.)

This particular religious experience, though, had a decidedly secular - you might even say smoky - flavor. On a family excursion to Bloomsburg, Pa., Ferguson spotted a sign for Forks Farm, where the initial goal was to score fresh-picked sweet corn for dinner.

What he encountered was chickens running in the high grass; a farmer who knew Sue Miller, who supplies farmstead cheeses to DiBruno's from her own spread in Birchrunville; and a pig pasture beside the farmstand.

Long story short, Ferguson left with not only sweet corn and jars of local pickles, but also fresh eggs and bacon better than he'd had in recent memory.

DiBruno's celebrates artisan cheese, he figured. Why not artisan bacon? And so it has come to pass.

Over the last few months he has scoured the Internet, had taste tests, invited in smokers and distributors.

By last weekend, you could find five varieties in the case in the back, staffers growing stout over microwaved bacon breakfasts, and an accumulating store of baconalia; staffer Hunter Fike's mac 'n' cheese 'n' bacon (with a lovely, Gruyere-like Ascutney Mountain cheese; see his recipe on the blog at www.dibruno.com); and Ferguson's girlfriend Jenny Van Horn's baked beans featuring maroon heirloom peregion beans and a soulful (read on) Hudson Valley bacon.

Samples have rolled in from six or seven suppliers. More are on the way - packaged and in slabs, suitable for whittling into lardons. River & Glen, the Warminster natural-and-sustainable foods provisioner, reports that it's trying to source an organic bacon.

For aficionados of Vermont's singular (but slowly fading) delicacy - cob-smoked hams and bacon - there was "Vermont Smoke and Cure" bacon from South Barre, Vt., thick-sliced, maple-cured, and smoked over, yes, corncobs, conferring subtle hint of sour. (This brand was subtler than some, the meat moistly pink and somewhat akin to Canadian bacon.)

There was Nodine's out of Connecticut, the double-smoked and bayou-style, but not the juniper, which of course was being touted in the skinny aisles as the best of the lot.

There was bacon from a roadside smokehouse near Nashville, Tenn. A Missouri smoker was in touch.

Chipotle, black-pepper, and cinnamon-rubbed varieties were teed up. Ferguson had procured pricey ($8.99 for three ounces) bars of exceedingly lush, complex Vosges' "Mo's Dark [chocolate] Bacon Bar." He handed out tastes of a sweet-smoky mayonnaise called "Baconnaise."

Finally, in a prosaic plastic wrapper, one could find thick-cut bacon from Mountain Products Smokehouse, a modest, ranchhouse-sized smoker in LaGrangeville, in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Had you fried up a few slices with your egg Monday morning, you might well have been dumbstruck.

So this is what bacon could be, it might have dawned - its salt and cure so in sync; its smoke woven into the flavor, not simply into the aroma; the chew thoroughly meaty, with little trace of greasiness.

"It is," ordained Ezekial Ferguson, "the steak of bacon."

And so it seemed.

And it was good.