Find the best bacon for your BLT

Soon it will happen.

Home gardeners who planted tomatoes by the beginning of May will reap the first ripe fruits on or around July 4.

Or so the Tidewater gardener's adage goes.

We recommend eating the initial sun-warmed, vine-ripened tomato early in the morning while standing in the garden in a shaft of sunlight. Grip the tomato and bite into it like an apple - it'll be messy, meaningful and so completely satisfying.

The second tomato? That's for the summer's first backyard BLT.

Anticipating that delight, we got to thinking - what bacon is worthy?

To find out, we collected a half-dozen brands, drove to Portsmouth, hefted our pork-filled cooler into chef Sydney Meers' kitchen at Stove, The Restaurant, and heated up the grill for a porkfest.

Meers, whose menu includes items such as "pork o rama" barbecue and "smoochie bear ham" with black pig pork belly, welcomed the challenge.

After two hours of sampling quarter slices of bacon atop fresh tomato points, we came to this conclusion: High-end and butcher-shop bacon can be more expensive, but the fact that they hardly shrink makes them excellent values.

Most importantly, they taste far better, too.

No. 1 choice: Edwards Pepper Coated Virginia Bacon

$6.39 per 12 ounces, purchased at Old Virginia Ham Shop, 217 E. Little Creek Road, Norfolk, (757) 583-0014

Our first impression: this is the prettiest bacon we've ever seen. The thick, identical strips are streaked with almost equal parts fat and meat, flecked with cracked pepper and finished with a pleasing scalloped border along one edge. When the package is opened, the bacon emits a sultry smokehouse aroma.

As recommended by Old Virginia Ham Shop owner Cher Bright, we baked a panful on a cookie sheet for about 15 minutes until slightly browned and medium-crisp. It hardly shrunk a millimeter.

The first toothsome bite delivered a big, rich pork flavor with a patina of smoke but without a preponderance of salt. The fat and the lean blended and balanced each other perfectly.

Edwards' bacon is more expensive than most of the others, but when cooked to medium-crisp and not a whit more, this is our No. 1 choice for that first backyard BLT.

Central Meats Sliced Smoked Bacon

$3.49 per pound at 1120 Kempsville Road, Chesapeake, (757) 547-2161 or www.centralmeats.com

Central Meats butcher shop offers everything from 320-pound sides of beef to pig's feet. All of it comes from animals raised without hormones on Virginia or North Carolina farms and processed without dyes or additives.

Several incarnations of bacon are available, but the most popular is the packed-to-order sliced smoked bacon from the meat counter.

Like Edwards', Central Meats' bacon has a balanced meat-to-fat ratio. The first bite elicited surprise - a whisper of herb, sage perhaps? The thick, slightly smoky, slightly salty strips have a meaty texture but aren't so thick that you can't bite through them.

We cooked ours on the griddle to medium-crisp and liked it fine. However, this bacon's flavors fully develop when it is cooked to a golden brown, but not burnt.

Our conclusion: this, our No. 2 bacon, is completely worthy of your first backyard BLT.

Smithfield Naturally Hickory Smoked Bacon

$2.89 for 12 ounces at Central Meats; widely available at grocery stores

After watching the other brands cook, the transformation of the grocery-store bacon was startling. On contact with the griddle, the thin slices seemed to cringe. They sizzled and shrank to frilly half-sized strips in no time.

The dominant flavor in Smithfield bacon was salt, and the fat lacked the silkiness and richness of the others. The bacon tasted best when cooked crispy but didn't make the cut for the first backyard BLT.

Gwaltney Applewood Smoked Premium Bacon

$2.49 for 12 ounces at Central Meats, but widely available at grocery stores

The Gwaltney slices were thin, and we cooked them to crispy. The taste was more salty than smoky, and it had a vague chemical flavor.

"This is what everyone is used to," Stove chef Sydney Meers said, shaking his head.

After sampling the other brands, we wouldn't squander our first backyard tomato this way.

Full Quiver Farm Smoked Pork Side Sliced

$9.95 per pound at 2801 Manning Road, Suffolk, (757) 539-5324 or www.fullquiverfarm.com

Don't let looks fool you; this bacon has more meat than meets the eye.

Full Quiver is a family farm in Suffolk that raises free-range cows, pigs and chickens in chemical-free pastures. Full Quiver's pale bacon strips are shorter than the others and at first appear to be too fatty. But once on the grill, the meat becomes more apparent and fat-to-lean ratio moves into acceptable territory with minimal shrinkage.

The clean flavor resembles ham more than bacon, with grace notes of sugar and smoke. Sliced thick, it would lend a chewy texture to a BLT. And while the flavor isn't classic bacon, it would be fine on a backyard BLT but might be even better with ham and eggs.

Jeb's Corner Market No Skin Sliced Bacon

$2.99 per pound at 15668 Carrollton Blvd., Suffolk, (757) 238-7044

Yup, there's a Jeb at Jeb's.

Jeb T. Bonnett has been in the butcher business for 25 years. Although he doesn't slice his own bacon, he did go to a considerable amount of trouble to find a source that meets his expectations.

This thick-sliced, hardwood-smoked bacon comes from Midwestern pigs. Our pound flashed wide, pink streaks of lean meat and a rich, smoky aroma. We cooked it to medium-crisp and it hardly shrank, but the flavor was milder than we preferred. We threw it back on the griddle, cooked it to crisp - not crunchy - and the flavor developed further.

For the price, this is good bacon, and it eclipsed grocery-store brands for taste and shrinkage. And if you don't want to go to the trouble of making your own BLT, Jeb's Diner, next to the market, serves a pimento cheese version.

Lorraine Eaton, (757) 446-2697, lorraine.eaton@pilotonline.com