The Best Meat Slicers for Bacon, Ranked by Blade Width

For bacon, buy the VEVOR 12-inch. It is the only slicer we list whose blade is wider than a whole cured pork belly, which means the belly goes on the carriage as one piece instead of being cut down to fit. If 46 lb of permanent bench fixture is too much machine, the BESWOOD 10-inch is the one to buy instead — not because it is bigger, but because BESWOOD is the only maker here that publishes the maximum cut size its carriage accepts.

The two specs that decide it

Slicer listings are full of numbers. For bacon, two of them matter and the rest are noise:

1. Blade diameter, because it sets how wide a piece you can slice in one pass. A slicer's usable cut height is always less than its blade diameter, since the blade has to clear the carriage.
2. Maximum thickness, because bacon is a thick slice by deli standards. A slicer that tops out at 6 mm is a deli-meat slicer, not a bacon slicer.

Motor wattage barely enters into it. Cured belly is soft; it is not the load that frozen venison is. That is a different page — see slicers for frozen meat.

Blade diameter against belly width

A pork belly from a mid-sized hog runs roughly 10 to 14 inches across the short dimension after trimming. That is the measurement your blade has to cover, and it is why this page is ordered by blade size:

Halving a belly is not a disaster, and plenty of people do it happily. What you lose is slice length: cut the belly in two and every rasher is half as long, which shows up in the pan. If you cure your own bellies and care about full-length bacon, the 12 in blade is the reason to spend the money.

How thick is bacon, in millimetres

Commercial thin-cut bacon is roughly 1.5 mm, standard cut around 2.5 mm, and thick cut around 4 to 6 mm. Every electric slicer on this page covers that band; what separates them is headroom above it.

Note the one unpublished row. We score that neutral rather than guessing, and it is the reason the Chef's Choice is last here despite being a well-regarded home slicer: for this specific job, the spec that decides it is missing.

The five, side by side

The part nobody mentions: fat cleanup

Bacon is the messiest thing you will put through a slicer. Cured pork fat goes everywhere, it sets hard when it cools, and it does not come off with a wipe. This is where the cheapest machine on the page has a real argument: the CUSIMAX is the only slicer here whose blade, food pusher and carriage all come off and are listed as dishwasher safe. The two carbon-steel VEVORs are hand-wash-and-dry, because carbon steel rusts if you leave it wet.

Chill the belly or fight it

A soft belly deforms against the blade and gives you wedge-shaped rashers. The fix is the same one the extension services give for jerky: get the meat firm first. PNW 632's wording for slicing meat is “firm but not solid”, and the National Center for Home Food Preservation gives the plain reason: partially frozen meat is easier to slice. For a cured belly, an hour or two in the freezer is usually enough to get there.

That is also the reason not to over-buy motor for this job. Firm-but-not-solid belly is an easy load. If you genuinely intend to slice meat that is harder than that, read our frozen-meat slicer page instead, because the spec that matters changes.

And if you are curing the belly yourself, the cure is the part to get right before the slicing: see our curing salt guide for which cure a bacon belly needs and why.

Which of our slicer pages you want

We keep three separate slicer rankings, because the three jobs do not reward the same machine:

There is overlap in the hardware — the two 10 in machines appear on all three — but the ranking changes because the deciding spec changes. If you want one slicer for all three jobs, buy the BESWOOD: it is the only one that publishes enough of its specs for you to check it against any of them.

How we ranked these

On the slicer rubric this site uses everywhere: blade size and type (20), motor and partially frozen meat (25), thickness range (20), cleanup and guarding (20), value at the live price (15). For this page the blade and thickness columns carry the argument, and the motor column is deliberately not the tie-breaker, because cured belly is a light load.

We have not bench-tested any of these slicers. Every figure above is the maker's published spec, from its own product page where it has one and from the maker-supplied listing copy otherwise. Where a maker publishes nothing — Chef's Choice on thickness, three of five on maximum cut size — we say so and score it neutral rather than filling the gap in.

What we would buy

Cure your own bellies and want full-length rashers: VEVOR 12 in. Want one slicer that does bacon, jerky and deli meat and publishes enough specs to be held to them: BESWOOD 250. Slice bacon three times a year and would rather put the machine in a cupboard: CUSIMAX, and accept halving the belly.

One thing to notice in the scores: the two 10 in machines outscore our top pick on the general slicer rubric, because that rubric is not weighted for belly width. That is deliberate and it is how every ranked page on this site works — the order answers the question in the title, and the score is the rubric's separate view of the product as a whole. Both are on the page so you can disagree with us.