The 2001 movie “Heist” is nothing special, but it includes one classic line, delivered by Danny DeVito: “Everybody loves money. That’s why they call it money.”

Now instead of “money,” swap in the word “bacon,” and you’ve got the makings of a great gastronomic tautology.

Talk to most people about bacon and you can almost hear their mouths watering. Talk to vegetarians and they’ll confess that bacon is the one food they miss the most. Indeed, with its sublime mix of meat, fat, salt, spices, and smoke, and its ideal chewy-to-crunchy ratio, bacon is arguably our most perfect food.

But some bacons are more perfect than others. With that in mind, I recently ordered 17 different bacons from the Grateful Palate (www.gratefulpalate.com), which carries several artisanal bacons and also administers the Bacon of the Month Club. Then I invited a dozen friends over to my apartment, where we spent the better part of a day eating and critiquing. Tasters recorded their reactions and impressions on notepads, so at the end of the day I had a pile of grease-stained pages (and, in the kitchen, more than a pint of rendered bacon fat).

You’d think 17 bacons would be enough, but I wanted to add one more to the mix: my own. I’d always wanted to try my hand at homemade bacon, and this was clearly the time to do it. Bacon comes from the hog’s belly (when you hear about “pork belly futures” traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, what you’re really hearing is the price of next year’s bacon), so I began by ordering a 4-pound slab of pork belly from my butcher.

Bacon is cured, which is easy enough to do. But then it’s smoked, which is trickier, especially in winter. I took solace, however, in the pages of Michael Ruhlman’s excellent new book, “Charcuterie” (W.W. Norton, $35), which states: “The smoke is really a secondary flavor, like a seasoning. The genuine bacon flavor comes from the sodium nitrite in the cure.”

Most bacon is cured simply from salt, some form of sugar – white, brown, honey, maple syrup – and sodium nitrite (which is perfectly harmless in small doses). But since I wasn’t going to smoke my bacon, I figured I’d better add some additional seasonings to my cure. I ultimately settled on a mix of salt, pepper, brown sugar, garlic, herbs, and nitrite. Then, as Mr. Ruhlman’s book instructs, I dredged the pork belly in the cure, put the belly into a Ziploc bag, and put the bag in the fridge, where it stayed for a week.

During that time, the salt in the cure drew liquid out of the belly, and the meat slowly changed from soft to firm. After the week was up, the next step would normally be smoking. But instead, following Mr. Ruhlman’s method, I put the cured belly into a 200-degree oven for two hours. Now the bacon was ready to be sliced and pan-fried.

How did it taste? Everyone agreed I’d created something really good – but not necessarily really good bacon. It was more like ham, or a thin pork chop. Part of this, I think, was the lack of smoke (next time I’ll use hickory-smoked salt, which I hadn’t thought of this time around). And part of it was that the belly wasn’t as thick as I would have liked, so next time I’ll try to get one from a farm-raised hog, instead of factory-raised.

As for the commercial bacons, there was a wide range of flavor profiles to sort through, attesting to the varied results that can be achieved with different cure recipes and smoke sources. And despite what you might think, sampling 17 bacons in one sitting – plus the host’s homemade version – is tough work. Many tasters began complaining of “bacon fatigue” about halfway through. Despite this, the very last entry presented to the tasters (Nodine’s Double-Smoked) generated some of the most positive response, confirming that there’s no such thing as too much bacon.

Or to put it another way, everybody likes bacon – that’s why they call it bacon.