Archives for the 'This Week in Bacon' Category
This Week in Bacon
A Burger King customer recently ordered extra bacon–none of it from a sheep–on their Whopper with Cheese Value Meal.
Sixty slices of it.
And then a Bacon Double Melt Value Meal for, I guess, dessert.
Yikes.
Via AboutColonBlank.
This Week in Bacon
You’ve got your beef stock, your chicken stock, your veggie stock, and your veal stock. Anyone with a bit of skill can make those. Then there’s your demi-glace. Anyone with a couple of days can make that.
But what about bacon stock or base?
Thankfully, the folks at Minor’s–who can turn anything into a base–have you covered with Minor’s Bacon Base.
Minor’s Bacon Base is a savory bacon paste made with USDA inspected bacon and ham. Southern-style seasoning at your fingertips! Add to black-eyed peas, beans, rice, casseroles, quiche, salad dressings, potato salad, fettuccini carbonara, scramble eggs and so much more.
Buy here.
This Week in Bacon
I was happy to see the maple bacon lolly get some play in The Onion this week, but the real bacon news comes courtesy of everyone’s favorite libertarian game show host, Drew Carey, at Reason.
Watch as Drew travels through L.A., where he uncovers the truth behind the illicit trade in… bacon hot dogs.
Crispy first brought you the plight of L.A.’s bacon dog vendors a couple of months back.
This Week in Bacon
Every year since 1991, DC-based Citizens Against Government Waste has released its fantastic and valuable Congressional Pig Book (summary | book). An anti-pork nonprofit, CAGW rails against wasteful congressional pet projects.
This year’s CAGW pork database produces fifty-four different results in a “food” keyword search, including $2.5 million to the Congressional Hunger Center; $1.5 million to design foods for health (Michael Pollan just died and rolled over in his grave); and $1.3 million to survey monkfish and migratory finfish trawling.
This may be pork of a different sort, but at times when we (diners, restaurateurs, waitstaff, and the like) are tightening our own belts, it’d be especially nice to see Congress stop robbing us blind by forcing us to fund their needless food (and other) projects.
Bonus Pork “Link”: I dig that the CAGW pig book cover stands nicely alongside those of food giants Jane Grigson and Fergus Henderson.
This Week in Bacon
Lowrey’s Hot & Spicy Bacon Curls–also known as chicharones or pork rinds—are just the thing for a Friday night gathering.
Lowrey’s Bacon Curls are available in Original and Hot & Spicy flavors. They’re not only delicious, they’re high in protein, and contain 60% less fat than fried pork rinds. Eat them right from the bag or with your favorite hot sauce, dip, salsa or barbecue sauce.
Lowrey’s site here. Fun & games from Lowrey’s here. “Cool,” half-a-decade-old “news” from Lowrey’s here.
This Week in Bacon
The big news in bacon this week, BusinessWeek reports, is that bacon is big news.
Bacon is such an American staple that more than half of U.S. households—53%—report always having bacon on hand and, despite its demonization by the food police, per capita consumption in the U.S. rose from 16.8 lbs. per person in 1998 to 17.9 lbs. in 2007. Most of this growth has occurred not in the home but in restaurants—and not as a breakfast food.
According to Jarrod Sutton of the National Pork Board, “The food-service industry has led bacon growth by adding bacon where it hasn’t been before. It’s not just a breakfast entrée anymore. Bacon is becoming more popular as part of the other two meals…it’s become a complementary item to salads, sandwiches, and baked potatoes.”
Bacon is so now even Eliot (sic) Gould comes with bacon these days.
This Week in Bacon
What do you get when you combine Winnipeg and Omega-3 acids? Winningpig!
[T]here’s something decidedly fishy about hogs waddling around three farms near Winnipeg.
Contained within their portly bodies is a glut of omega-3s, the fatty acids found mainly in seafood that make oily fish so healthy.
For years, researchers have puzzled over how to add these highly sought-after oils to the flesh of other animals, with little success.
But over the past five months, Prairie Orchard Farms, a small research and marketing firm in rural Manitoba, has won two prestigious awards for doing just that. First came the federal government’s highest honour for agricultural innovation in November and, three months later, another Alberta-based prize for pork innovation.
The omega-3 pig looks and tastes much like an average hog, but it could prove to be a lucrative new entry into a market that’s increasingly wary of the health risks of red meat.
“I know a product like healthy bacon almost sounds like an oxymoron” said Willy Hoffmann, president of Prairie Orchard, located about 45 minutes west of Winnipeg in Elie, Man. “We have a novel product that way.”
The tale of how Prairie Orchard stumbled upon omega-3 pork is one of luck and perseverance.
More on that tale here. Prairie Orchard Farms describes is suped-up pigs (featuring audio and video links) here. Pick up your Omega-3 bacon — which I hope tastes better than the Prairie Orchard Farms photo pictured above makes it appear — here.
NPR on earlier U.S. scientists’ efforts to cram good fats into bacon here. Slashfood noting Omega-3 bacon was, in 2006, just a bacony pie in the sky idea here.
This Week in Bacon
When someone boasts they’ve “made meat candy that’s so awesome,” you know I’m paying attention. And when I see they’re talking about a Maple-Bacon Lollipop, you know I’m all ears.
I’m even willing to look past the fact it’s billed as sustainable and organic. About $2 a pop at Lollyphile.
Thanks to Bill & Jenny for the tip.
This Week in Bacon
The bacon & Nutella sandwich is one of those foods that makes no sense for about five seconds, and total sense thereafter. In that way it’s kind of like Leonardo DiCaprio’s command performance as undercover Boston cop Billy Costigan Jr.* in one of my favorite movies, The Departed.
Get more clever recipes like this one at Open Source Food.
Get your “spreadably delicious” Nutella here.
*You’re telling me you’ve got Bostonians Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg in a movie centered around Southie, and you make a one-time pretty boy who was born in Hollywood like DiCaprio a tough, Boston-born hero? Actually, yeah, totally.
Bacony-Good Vodka
It seems like this is fifth-hand at this point, but the Accidental Hedonist shares the beauty that is… bacon-flavored vodka.
The recipe is basically the same as that for infusing pretty much any flavor into food or drink. Make some bacon, put it in a mason jar, pour vodka over, let it sit, strain, voila.
I’d like to get some generic hooch — or maybe something abhorrent like Captain Morgan — and infuse it with bologna. Or Spam.
This Week in Bacon
Celebrate National Pig Day tomorrow with Wild Boar Bacon from the wonderful folks at D’Artagnan.
Perfect for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. (Talk about great bacon-cheese burgers!) This bacon is cut from the bellies of free-range Wild Boar. You’ll find the flavor full-bodied without being “gamey.” A great gift, especially when combined with D’Artagnan Duck Bacon. After all its boar, not boring!
More on tomorrow’s holiday from us and from Epicurious.
This Week in Bacon
Stand by your ham! That’s the refrain coming from chefs and pig farmers in Britain, where local bacon and pork products are evidently less frequently consumed. Gordon Ramsay (who raised pigs for slaughter on his great BBC show, The F Word) is on board, as is his sometime F Word collaboratrix extraordinaire, the bawdy Janet Street Porter. And British pork fans aren’t stopping here. There’s not only a best bacon in Britain award, there’s even a song, “Stand by Your Ham,” sung the tune of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man”.
Farmers’ video site here. More on the pro-pork campaign here, and at the aptly named pigsareworthit.com.
This Week in Bacon
I have always secretly believed that all good things come from the mind of a Des Moines insurance salesman. Via Coldmud and the Des Moines Register, I learn that Brooks Reynolds, an insurance salesman from Des Moines, has proven me correct.
[W]hen Brooks Reynolds was asked the question Des Moines always asks itself - “What does Des Moines need?” - this is what he said:
“A festival for bacon.”
Thus, the High Life Lounge will hold its first Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival March 1, National Pig Day, attracting bacon lovers from California and Arizona along with a Pittsburgh bacon blogger.
To Reynolds, it was no throwaway line. For years, he has gathered his buddies for a summer weekend pilgrimage to a Spirit Lake cabin for “all things bacon,” toting along 15 pounds.
When they returned, their wives and girlfriends complained their very skin smelled like bacon grease.
“Why not bring it to the masses?” asked Reynolds, 32, a Des Moines insurance salesman.
You’ve still got a couple of weeks to figure out how to get yourself to Iowa to take part in the March 1 National Bacon Day festivities at the highly rated High Life Lounge. $30 gets you a bunch of bacon-themed goodies, cheap beer, and a “bacon lecture”. There’s even a bacon-eating contest.
Barring a trip to Iowa — as winter, distance, and Iowa’s very Iowa-ness do for me — you can find more locally bacon-friendly things to engage in at Serious Eats, which had a fantastic rundown of all the things to eat and places to eat them at for last year’s National Bacon Day.
This Week in Bacon
Worried that on your next wilderness adventure you will likely have neither the time nor wherewithal to slay and cure a feral pig, and thus camp sans bacon? Have no fear! This week we bring you the indubitably delectable Precooked Eggs with Bacon — Breakfast Entree One Color by Mountain House.
Now you can bring the eggs. Mountain House’s Precooked Scrambled Eggs with Bacon yields enough for two, half-cup serving. It’s the easy way to make breakfast. Just add boiling water to the pouch and watch the sun come up while you eat.
The remarkable shelf life of Mountain House products explained here.
This Week in Bacon
Via Gridskipper, Chicago’s Menu Pages has a cool, nationally tinged photo roundup featuring a drink that makes perfect sense but that I didn’t even know existed: the Bacon Bloody Mary. Included are shots from bacon Bloodies from far-afield bars in Boston, Brooklyn, DC, Chicago, Milwaukee (note the cool squat High Life chaser bottle in the shot), and someone’s kitchen.
Those of you (like me) in DC can find the Tonic Bacon Bloody here. Our friends at EatFoo hit the bacon-infused vodka tip over the summer. Finally, Milwaukee’s Comet (from whence the High Life shot at right comes) — in addition to its Bacon Bloody — hands out free bacon each and every Sunday evening, according to Bacon Unwrapped.
This Week in Bacon
The weekly feature returns with Spam with Bacon. From the product description, which was clearly written by someone who ties happiness to canned pork:
Ever wonder what would happen if something great got even better? Well, quit it. Since we’ve combined Spam Classic and bacon you’ve been thinking too much. Stop staring off into space like that and be happy. Now that Spam is flavored with bacon, happiness is everywhere, but mostly in the frying pan.
Pick yours up here. More varieties here. If this also makes you so very, very happy, map your way to the Spam Museum.
This Week in Bacon*
Not to be confused with that other TWIB acronym, this here bacony-good item of the week is Country Bacon Quaker Instant Grits.
Pick yours up here. Quaker Grits page here.
*Note that I’ve launched (what I expect will become) a weekly food meme featuring bacon products with a product that — while a “good source of calcium and iron” — is not a good source of bacon, as it contains exactly no bacon at all.
