Roll up! Roll up! The How to Eat circus is back in town, and, this month, we're firing up the frying pan, breaking open the sliced white and having a bacon sandwich. Below the line, expect salty exchanges, pig-headed opinions, saucy interjections...

Essential, I'd say. Unless any foolhardy vegetarians want to make the case for fake-on? But which bacon, smoked or unsmoked, fatty or trimmed? And what part does grilling or frying play in that decision? Microwave users and those who oven bake bacon, are politely asked to click away, now.

I don't know when this happened (2006?), but smoked bacon – cheaply, acridly, industrially "smoked" bacon – is now ubiquitous. To the point where, when you actually taste plain old piggy bacon, it can seem like a revelation. Smoked bacon has its uses, but certainly on a bacon sandwich, you want unsmoked bacon. Bacon that delivers a sweet, light, slightly salty, but profoundly bacon-y (it's a technical term; see Harold McGee) bang for your buck.

As for the cut, middle is acceptable if you can find it; if a little fiddly, size-wise, for a sandwich. But the real choice is between streaky and back. For me, back is the king of sandwich bacons. For three main reasons:

1) It offers the perfect ratio of meat to fat.

2) If you're using a square, white bread of normal dimensions, three slightly overlapped rashers of back provide the ideal volume of filling. You want a little bulk in there, not a flat plateau of pig.

3) Ideally, you would fry your bacon. But there is so much crap, watery bacon around that you may well end up having to grill it. If you do, it is almost impossible to grill streaky effectively without turning it into an oversized Frazzle: dry, brittle, and with none of the mellow, meaty flavour that you want. It is too unforgiving.

In a perfect world, you would have rashers of (dry-cured, outdoor bred, rare breed) back bacon, edged with up to an inch of fat, which, in a very hot pan, you would fry very briefly until the edges begin to curl golden brown. Do not incinerate it. You want a balance of succulent protein, marked with tangy patches of char, a perimeter of sweet, silky fat, and, at its edge, the primitive kick that only crisp, carbonised fat can deliver. If you need to grill it, grill it. But back bacon is still preferable.

A good bacon roll is no bad thing: a proper artisan roll, with a nice pull and chew to its crust; the base heavy with melted fats; overloaded with juicy bacon; you can't argue with that. But that is a bacon roll, not a bacon sandwich.

It has become accepted wisdom (indeed, it's a guilty pleasure that makes middle-class foodies unreasonably giddy), that a bacon sandwich demands plastic, supermarket white bread. But it doesn't, really. Yes, you need white bread. Anything dense, brown, nutty or worthy is going to be too dry and too tasty to be suitable, here. The bacon should be the clear star of this show.

However, there is white bread and there is white bread. And that applies to Chorleywood sliced white, as much as it does to many supposedly upmarket artisan loaves. Crucially, what you need here is a bread with some resistance: soft, yielding, but still durable. There is supermarket bread that is so insubstantial, so lightly cotton-woolly, so like packing foam, that it tears on the application of anything firmer than melting butter. Then there is, for example, Warburton's toastie loaf. Examine a slice of it, and you'll find it has an uneven, twisted, layered, almost bias-cut texture, which gives it a surprising strength. Whatever white bread you use for your bacon sandwich, it is crucial that it can stay the course.

To that end, very lightly grill-toasting – or, better still, quickly frying in the rendered fat – one side of each of your slices of bread, can be very useful. If you need to add a bit of backbone. However, the complete toasting of bacon sandwich bread is an affectation of rank stupidity. Toast = dryness = a bacon sandwich that's a right chore to chew down.

Is butter a sauce in this case? It should be. You want a thicker layer of the stuff (not margaraine!), that will melt over and envelope your bacon in a brilliant, filthy orgy of animal fats. As with many of the best things in life, so in the bacon sandwich: the more lubrication the better.

Well, up to a point. HP or ketchup? I'd say neither. Unless we're talking the thinnest whisper. Surely you want to taste the bacon or what are we all doing here? Certainly mayo (hot it's an abomination) or mustard (you may as well bin the bacon, for all that you will taste it) are unacceptable.

Do some people really put marmalade on bacon sandwiches? And, if so, why are they not being prosecuted?

Do not double-up! No good will come of it; only a muddled mouthful. Tempting as it might seem, do not try and stuff a full English into a bacon sandwich. Sausage and bacon just leads to confusion, an unsatisfactory halfway house of flavours. A fried egg (unless the yolk is hard and where's the fun in that?) seems appealing, due to the creamy quality that the white adds, but the result is always yolk running down your fingers and congealing cold on the plate. Which is deeply unappetising. Cheese, particularly when you're hungover, seems an obvious addition, but it is too much of a good thing: too rich, too fatty, too cloying, and rather like throwing a fire blanket over your bacon. It smothers any character it once had.

I can't stress this enough: cut your bacon sandwich in half. If you don't, at some point at least one rasher of bacon will fall out. It's down to what scientists call sod's law. Or possibly some sort of physics. I forget. Either way, once it's happened, there is no way of reinserting that rasher in a satisfactory, properly symmetrical aligned way. Without entirely deconstructing your sandwich and starting from scratch. Preferably, stood at a counter, over and above it, rather than sat down. During which vital seconds, your bacon sandwich is going cold. The moment is slipping through fingers. Literally and metaphorically. It's a disaster, basically.

Tea. And not just a mug of it, a bucket. Possibly full-fat Coke (the soft drink, not the nasal decongestant), if your bacon sandwich is less breakfast and more a morning-after lifeline.

So, bacon sandwiches, how do you eat yours?