Thrushwood Farms – Galesburg, Illinois

Thrushwood Farms Quality Meats, Inc. is one of a small handful of Illinois meat markets who routinely win awards for their bacon year after year. Located on the edge of Galesburg, Illinois Thrushwood Farms has been in business since 1978 owned and operated by the skilled butchers of the Hankes family.

Inside the building, there is a large retail store with a lot of different kinds of things to choose from besides meats. They have desserts, Wisconsin cheeses, and several other food items to help you make a full meal. They also have plenty of fresh meats behind the meat case.

All of their bacon comes vacuum sealed in one pound packages. Not only do they have Applewood smoked bacon, but they also have regular hickory smoked bacon and they have a bacon that is uncured. Their uncured bacon has no nitrates or nitrites and uses celery salt as the source of the sodium nitrates. We did not purchase that kind of bacon at this time due to travel constraints and concerns about transporting uncured bacon for a couple more days in a hot trunk it a cooler. We bought the applewood bacon instead, to add some variety to the bevy of hickory smoked bacons that we normally find and review.

I was approached by a very friendly and helpful employee while I was at the store. I really appreciated speaking with her. They are definitely very proud of their meats and they have the awards to back it up.

Applewood Smoked Bacon

Thurshwood makes a very delicious applewood smoked bacon! The smoke flavor is not too heavy, the saltiness is just right and the flavor is fairly robust. It definitely makes you want to have another bite! Where it came up short for us was in the shrinkage. It shrank three (3) whole inches during cooking which for this package was 37.5%. That is an incredible amount of shrinkage.

All in all we recommend Thrushwood Farms bacon for its excellent flavor, but do note that it will shrink down in size considerably.