I’ve got a t-shirt that announces “Bacon is meat candy,” and, in addition to my maple-syrup cured bacon, Bali Bacon is another one that proves the truth of this dictum.  In addition to being cured with generous amounts of Big Tree’s palm sugar with ground ginger, it gets coated with more of it when it comes hot out of the smoker. But it’s not sickly or cloyingly sweet.  Ginger is a natural partner for pork, and it gives it a subtle spiciness, while Big Tree’s long pepper also brightens and punches up the flavor.  The result is a mildly sweet and spicy bacon, coming to you from the South Pacific.

Here’s my recipe:

one, 5-pound chunk of pork belly
40 g salt
5 g cure #1
70 g Big Tree palm sugar with ground ginger
10 g Big Tree long pepper

For me, this this bacon makes Sunday morning.  It’s great with pancakes, but the perfect accompaniment is Sharon Kramis’ buttermilk scone recipe from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book (page 582).  Just substitute candied ginger for the currants.

In addition to restocking the Club with all the kinds of bacon I’ve made before – maple-syrup cured bacon, black pepper-coated bacon, Bali bacon, and black bacon – I’m experimenting with one totally new one: a bacon cured in Scotch Whisky.  This is for my good friend, Pompom, who (for better and for worse) has introduced me to the pleasures of good Scotch.

Hogshead is not the piece of meat I’m trying to cure; it’s the name of a good, blended malt Scotch.  When I heard the name and saw this picture on the label, I knew this is the Scotch to use.  But first the alcohol needs to be cooked off.  (In her cookbook, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, Paula Wolfert quotes Thomas Keller to the effect that alcohol will denature and “cook” the proteins in meat, sealing the surface and preventing absorption of a marinade or cure.  Since acids have the same effect, as in ceviche, this makes sense to me.)  So I warm the Scotch up in a pan, light it, and when the flames die out (which takes a couple minutes!), then I add puréed golden raisins, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, and take it off the heat.  When this mix cools down, I add salt, cure #1, and just a wee bit of mace and long pepper.

Here are the exact quantities I’m working with: (more…)

While pancetta (at least American-made versions of it) is available at local grocery stores, guanciale (pronounced “gwan-chi-ah-lay”) is only made by a few American producers and rarely imported.  Not one of my Italian cookbooks lists it in the index; Pamela Sheldon Johns’ book on Italian cured meats does not mention it.  Even in Italy, most Italians have not heard of it or even tasted it, unless they’re familiar with the region of Lazio, around Rome, where guanciale is considered essential for spaghetti carbonara or pasta al’amatriciana.

Although Ari Weinzweig, in his bacon book, claims that the word guanciale comes from the Italian word for “pillow,” it seems much more likely that it comes from the Italian guancia, which means “cheek,” since this particular cured meat is made with hog jowls or cheeks.  It’s cured like pancetta, with salt, pepper, and fresh herbs like thyme, rosemary, and sage, and hung to dry without smoking.  For my version, I harvest fresh thyme and rosemary from the garden, pounded them with the other spices in the mortar, rubbed the cure on for a week, and then hung the jowls to dry for at least a month.

What makes it different from pancetta is the consistency of the fat and the extra collagen in the cheek.  (more…)

Last night, my good buddy Dan pointed out that just about every friggin’ post for the last three weeks has been about bacon. Not sure what his point was. So, anyway, I won’t even mention the fabulous dark chocolate with black bacon bits that he contributed to last night’s gala.

The occasion was a fundraiser for our local Books to Prisoners project, which staffs two lending libraries in the Champaign County Jails as well as taking requests directly from prisoners and mailing books to them. If you’re not familiar with this great program, check it out and please help support it!

My small contribution was some pulled pork sandwiches and this bacon apple crisp. The recipe comes from Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon, and, I have to say, I had my doubts about it.  It reminds me of the recipe for “pear pizza” in Lynn Rosetto Kasper’s great little book, The Italian Country Table, which combines lemon, orange, fresh basil and rosemary, as well as cinnamon, freshly ground black pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil, on a slightly sweet, pear-covered pizza.  This is either going to be great or ghastly, I thought.  The result?  Delicioso!  This crisp seemed to be a hit at the party, with many people coming back for several helpings.  Everyone said it was delicious, but not everyone realized at first that those yummy, crispy, crunchy bits under the streusel topping were whole slices of caramelized bacon.

Ari’s recipe calls for Felix Schlosser’s Arkansas bacon, which is coated with “long” pepper from the island of Bali.  While this may sound odd, like the freshly ground black pepper on the pear pizza, the spicy, woody flavor of this pepper complements the cinnamon in the crisp, while the “heat” from the pepper counterpoints the sweetness.  Ari, and Zingerman’s, we owe you!  As I’ve said before, simple food like this does so much more to contribute to our happiness than we really know.

This recipe is based on Maynard Davies’ description of a traditional bacon called “the Staffordshire Black.”

As he explains, in Secrets of a Bacon Curer, this version comes “from the north of the county where they had the mining industry, and where they made all the china. All of this was hard manual work and the Staffordshire workers needed a good quality bacon to give them energy. The Staffordshire Black was cured with dark treacle and sugar and its sweetness gave them energy.

“In the pottery industry, once the huge bottle kilns were fired, the firers were not allowed to leave it, so they used to have to sleep round the kiln until it was ready. The kiln firers used to have a boy to fetch the beer and a boy to cook the meals, and the majority of the meals were cooked in the bottle oven.

“They cooked the bacon on a shovel where it cooked very quickly so you needed a bacon cut that could take the heat. They would also add eggs and cheese and served it all up on the Staffordshire oat cakes – that is a traditional Staffordshire breakfast. They used to put the bacon, cheese and egg on the oat cake and roll it all up and eat it like that” (144-5).

With only this decription to go on, here is the recipe I came up with:

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Many thanks to Bob Dirks for alerting me to a recent Tribune article about our continuing in-fat-uation with bacon in general and about Baconfest Chicago in particular. At first I was surprised that I had not heard of Baconfest before (I really have to get out from under my rock more often), and then I was even more surprised that they, apparently, have not heard of me.

After all, their first event, a VIP Bacon Cook Off, at which their “Golden Rasher” awards were given out, was this past weekend, at the Publican in Chicago, and inexplicably they were able to pull it off without me in attendance – judging, officiating, eating, or just rolling in the bacon grease. I can only guess that my official invitation, printed in edible ink on an actual slice of bacon, got confiscated by some errant envelope-sniffing dog at the Post Office. I’m sure they’ll make it up to me. Any day now.

Just what is Baconfest? I can’t do any better than quote the description on their own website:

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I honestly don’t waste one second of one minute worrying about what’s “trendy” when it comes to food. That’s exactly how the skills that go into producing an honest, traditional food, such as bacon, get neglected and lost: everyone is so frantically chasing the new thing, jumping on the new bandwagon, that a craft that takes years, decades, or even a lifetime of experience to hone, has no chance to develop. It’s lucky enough just to survive in a few pockets far from the madding crowd.

Since I don’t waste time on forums of foodie fascistas, I am desperately behind the times and it comes as news to me that bacon’s epitaph has already been written. In response to the preliminary skirmishes leading up to Baconfest Chicago in the spring (more on that later), the latest edition of Time Out Chicago published “a call to the world to stop it with the bacon already.” Apparently, they already missed the boat. Googling “anti-bacon backlash” turned up any number of foodie forums full of people declaiming “bacon is dead,” “bacon is boring,” and “bacon has jumped the shark.”

Apparently, bacon is so passé in LA “that not only has bacon jumped the shark, but also saying ‘bacon has jumped the shark’ has jumped the shark!” (At this point, imagine an infinite regression or mise en abyme of frenzied trendies, desperate to jump each other and proclaim themselves king for a day or even a nano-second by declaring all previous declarations of jumping the shark have jumped the shark. Is it just me or has the expression “jumped the shark” itself already jumped the shark?  A conundrum to worry the super-chic.)

What all this trend-surfing or zeitgeist-navel-gazing has lost sight of is the meat of the matter. For those of you who don’t give a shit about the fad but care about actual bacon, I am the bearer of glad tidings.

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While I’ve been preoccupied in the woodshop this week, I’ve been making my way through Maynard Davis’ second little book, Secrets of a Bacon Curer. While there isn’t much in the way of “secrets” given away here (I’m guessing there’s more of that in his latest book, Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer), it’s still a great read.

One thing that struck a chord with me is his insistence that a variety of different sugars and different salts are a traditional part of the craft and are part of what used to make the bacon from one part of the country different from the bacon produced elsewhere. As he writes on page 24 of this book, “different salts give different tastes. Whether rock salt, sea salt, lump salt, dairy salt, bay or roman salt; they all give a different flavor to the bacon. The skill is in mixing the right sugar with the right salt and they are all different grades and impurities to give the desired taste.” He goes on to talk about “all the main sugars: muscovados light and dark; molasses; all the treacles and all the herbs which give bacon its distinctive flavour.”

Like most newly-converted meatheads, I got my start with Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie book, and one of the strengths of this book for a beginner is that they keep it simple (stupid!) by sticking to only one salt (Kosher Diamond) and just a few sugars (white and brown). But if you really want to explore the wonderful possibilities of bacon, it’s time to take off the training wheels and explore some more flavorful possibilities.

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Many thanks to Ari Weinzweig and his Guide to Better Bacon for championing this book. I had heard of it before, and looked it up, but (like Ari initially) took one look at the two-color cover, saw recipes still calling for saltpeter, and dismissed it as irrelevant, as hopelessly out of date. What a mistake!

While, as Ari points out, the story of his life would hardly qualify as “adventures” by TV standards, with food programming that’s more about adventures, risk-taking, and thrills than about real food, I found the book hard to put down once I started. Maynard’s account of his life reminded me of an interview that I was fortunate enough to have a few years back with the master cabintetmaker James Krenov. After talking about the “studio furniture” scene, which was full of arty pretensions and more flash than substance, James Krenov said that his main hope for his life’s work – his furniture, his books, his teaching – was that it would help to make more of a place for “quiet work,” work that didn’t need to scream or shout. Maynard’s is just such a quiet book, all about hard work, work well done, and the peace and contentment they bring.

And he certainly had experiences that were adventures to him!

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Whan that Octobere, with his snew shoures calte,
The harte of manne hath shivered to the roote,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimage,
And bringen home som bacon for to priketh hir courage.
– with apologies to Geoffrey Chaucer!

In his Guide to Better Bacon, Ari Weinzweig says that Nueske’s is the bacon that they sell and use the most at Zingerman’s Deli and Roadhouse, and he quotes R. W. Apple’s claim, in the New York Times, that Nueske’s is “the beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of rashers.” In other words, well worth a pilgrimage when you find yourself visiting friends who live a mere 40 miles away. After eating it at every meal for a couple days, I can pronounce that it is indeed superb bacon. Nearly as good as the bacon that I make and offer to TLP members.

But don’t take my word for it; judge for yourself. I bought a whole, 10-pound slab, and, as a special offer this month, Nueske’s bacon will be available to any member placing an order. If you think Nueske’s bacon tastes better, I’ll refund the money you wasted on my bacon. That’s putting my money where my big mouth is!

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