New store lets customers bring home the bacon
The Enterprise — Elizabeth Floyd Mair
Multi-generational: Bobby Chandler, co-owner of the new Guilderland store For the Love of Bacon, shows off his daughter, Kennedy, 4, and some of the bacon-related products that the store stocks. Their main offerings are their own farm-fresh meats and wood-grown mushrooms.
GUILDERLAND — A new store called For the Love of Bacon, located in Guilderland’s Hometown Dental Plaza on Western Avenue near Carman Road, is very much a family affair. It is co-owned by Christine and Bob Chandler and their son, Bobby.
Christine and Bob Chandler bring in the bacon and other fresh meats grown on their Mariaville Farm — 300-plus acres where they raise Black Angus cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, turkeys, and ducks. Hickory, maple cinnamon, and applewood are some of the most popular of their 15 varieties of bacon.
They sell bacon with or without nitrates and even have beef bacon.
Their son, Bobby, owns Mariaville Mushroom Men and is displaying all manner of mushroom products, starting with an assortment of his own wood-grown mushrooms, including shiitake, oyster, lion’s mane, chestnut, pioppino, and reishi.
There is also the line of “Shroom Shakers” that he produces. He explains that these are “100 percent dried mushrooms” and “a nice way to shake some mushroom flavor onto anything you’re cooking.” Bobby Chandler also offers a line of mushroom teas that he says can have beneficial effects on health.
For those who want to ensure an ongoing supply of mushrooms, he sells mushroom kits — mushroom logs that will produce shiitake mushrooms again and again for several years and oyster kits that will fruit several times.
The store also stocks goods from other local farmers’ market vendors that the Chandlers buy wholesale. These include locally produced eggs, honey, maple syrup, rubs and sauces, Palatine Cheese, Pucker’s Pickles, Buddhapesto, and coffee from Lucy Jo’s Coffee Roastery.
The Chandlers plan to begin to offer take-and-bake frozen meals featuring their products, such as macaroni-and-cheese with bacon, frozen mushroom soup, and vegetarian frozen lion’s-mane crabcakes (lion’s-mane mushrooms taste a little like crab, says Bobby Chandler).
And there are other bacon-related products, including bacon soda, bacon coffee, bacon peanut butter, bacon jam, bacon pancakes, and bacon jerky.
The store, which recently had a soft opening, will have its grand opening on Saturday, Dec. 10, and will be offering samples all day. There will be drawings of a mushroom basket and a bacon basket.
