Forget web 2.0, forget medical research, forget space exploration, finally, out of Leeds University, comes research that really matters.
Experts at Leeds University discovered the secret to the ideal sandwich lay in how crispy and crunchy rashers were.
Leeds University: The LARD of bacontarianism salutes you.
Link
I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather deal with the odd clogged artery, than eat pork spliced with earthworm genes, but for those of us more worried about the health effects of excessive bacon eating, perhaps this is the nicotine patch they’ve been waiting for?
Healthy Bacon? Let us know what you think?
Making Bacon That’s Healthier for You A team of researchers may have found a way to make bacon that’s good for your heart. This stunning achievement comes from a mixture of molecular genetics, cloning, and good old American know-how. The key to this delicious prospect? A modified gene that changes some of the omega-6 fatty acids — which pigs normally create — into omega-3 fatty acids.
I’m well into my ham from Emile over at Caw Caw Creek. My rendered lard collection was at a critically low point this morning, but I have been saving the rind and fat that I trim from the ham for just such an occasion.
I tossed the rinds and fat in a pan, covering them with water so that they wouldn’t burn as they rendered, and turned up the heat.
My wife, the Velveteen Rabbi, has been taking a course this semester (in her ultimate pursuit of a rabbinic degree) called “Deep Ecuminism”. The aim of the course is to recognize similarities between different faiths and open opportunities for dialogue between those who follow different belief systems.
In that spirit, I’ve been thinking lately about ways Bacontarians can reach out to our brothers and sisters who keep kosher or halal. How can we share our joy in the LARD with those whose forbids them to consume pork?
I think I may have stumbled upon the solution.
Beef bacon, or as we’ve been calling it around our house – bBacon (pronounced “buh-BA-con”.)
It looks like bacon. Certainly more so than turkey bacon or various forms of tofu-related “facon”. The main visual dissimilarity comes out when you try to separate pieces of the raw meat – the fat layer on bBacon is more fragile than on pork bacon, and tends to expand into fat lacework if you pull it too hard.
It cooks like bacon. It cooks slowly, evenly and isn’t prone to scorching, like turkey bacon. It gives off LOTS of fat, if you cook it long enough to get strips good and crunchy. (Conveniently, I’d just cooked a kilo of real bacon before cooking 340g of bBacon. I saved the LARD from the former and the suet from the latter, and the volumes of fat yielded appear to be roughly proportional.)
Observant jews will eat it. No observant Muslims were available for our tests, but Margaret, pictured above, described it as “sinfully delicious, yet halakhically correct”. (No, the Velveteen Rabbi doesn’t keep kosher. She, too, is an observant bacontarian.)
bBacon is described on the package as “cured and smoked beef plate”. Beef plate is also known as “flank” or “hanger” steak, a fatty cut of meat that tastes wonderful when marinated and served as fajitas. The high fat content makes it work as a fried meat – leaner cuts wouldn’t yield sufficient fat to cook properly. The bBacon I tasted was produced by Gwaltney, a proud old Virginia-based ham producer. Smithfield, Virginia, where the company is based, claims to have produced acorn-fed ham since 1627 – Gwaltney has been a going concern since 1870, and is part of Smithfield Foods, the only Fortune 500 company I know of whose web splash page is an attractively spiral-cut ham. In other words, these people understand bacon.
And they evidently understand bBacon as well. The bBacon I tasted was smoky, but not artifically so, pleasantly salty, much less sweet than many bacons, an excellent balance of meat and fat, and, frankly, pretty damned delicious. Given a choice between run-of-the-mill, storebought, presliced bacon and bBacon, I’d likely go with the bBacon, as it cooks more consistently than most cheap bacon I’ve sampled. It’s not quite the religious experience a hand-cut piece of expertly smoked pork bacon is, but it’s not even in the same ballpark as pale imitators like turkey bacon.
Which opens some interesting questions: if it looks like bacon, cooks like bacon, tastes a whole lot like bacon, but is made of cow, not pig… is it bacon? And if so, what does this mean for our faith – nay, for our very way of life?
My loving sister-in-law and mother-in-law ordered me a salt cured, dry aged pig leg from Caw Caw Creek Pastured Pork. I first read about Emile’s pasturing technique in “Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them” by Peter Kaminsky, a book that I recommend to any Bacontarian.
I’m a couple of pounds into this ham already, and, after getting the hang of slicing it thin enough, I am happier than a pig in a pasture of acorns. The meat is quite salty, but not so much as to get in the way of the meaty, nutty flavors. The colors range from translucent pink to deep, dark red. The smell is slightly sweet and musky, and headily intoxicating.
When talking to Emile DeFelice it is apparent that he enjoys what he is doing, bringing great pigs to market in the US. He succinctly (but thoroughly) answered all of my questions, and was a pleasure to talk to. I like the fact that my ham came from a guy I would like to have a pint with.
Happy Hamming!
The miracle of tempura?
It makes vegetables so tasty that you sometimes get a seasoned bacontarian to eat broccoli.
My friend Nathan, a passionate fan of Japanese cuisine, recently taught me a simple tempura recipe, as well as a truly repulsive mock ponzu sauce. We battered and deep fried sweet potatoes, carrots, onion, red and green pepper, brocoli and shrimp and ate them standing in front of the stove so nothing got cold.
It was delicious. But there was something missing.
Bacon.
If tempura could make me crave sweet potatoes, just think what it could do for that most blessed of foods.
With friends coming to celebrate Sukkot with us, I decided the perfect snack for our decidedly unorthodox household was tempura bacon. Our local butcher cut a pound of bacon very thick, and I fried it up, leaving it significantly limper than I’d usually serve it.
I whipped up Nate’s tempura batter – half a cup of warm water, a beaten egg, a big pinch of salt, sufficient flour to make a thin, lumpy batter, about 3/4 cup – and cut the bacon into bite-sized chunks. And I cut a couple of onions into chunks as well figuring that I’d want to accomodate the vegetarians as well.
This turned out to be a critical factor in the recipe’s success. My friend Seth Brown, master of all fried foodstuffs, showed up to help me batter and fry the bacon. (Seth is notorious in our circle of friends for having such a frying-centric approach to cooking that, in college, he briefly suffered from scurvy before friends diagnosed his bleeding gums and prescibed lime juice.)
We quickly discovered that tempura bacon, while crunchy and smoky, suffered from a surplus of batter. The payload needed more mass to properly balance the batter. Seth’s solution – pair a bite of bacon with a slice of onion.
The resulting tempura bites have an elegant balance of softness and crunch, and a pleasant melding of the onion’s sweetness with the bacon and batter’s salt.
We served them in the sukkah with a soy/garlic/red pepper dipping sauce.
Mmm. Sacri-delicious.
Brothers and sisters, we face a theological crisis, a test of our very faith in the LARD. As you’ve surely seen, there is mounting evidence that the world as we know it was created through a process called Intelligent Design, where an entity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, through the manipulation of his noodly appendages, shaped our collective reality. Manifestations of the FSM are permeating the Internet and the ranks of so-called Pastafarians are growing.
Little is known about Pastafarian practices: we do know that they believe in wearing pirate garb, take Fridays off from work, believe in a moral code as flexible as the noodles they worship and believe that heaven features a stripper factory and a beer volcano… all theological principles compatible with orthodox Bacontarianism.
However, we do not know what Pastafarians believe about the LARD. We do not know whether they recognize bacon as a sacrament or whether they understand the importance of the Holy LARD in both religious practice and daily life.
Meditating on this issue over a bacon-laced Cobb salad, I realized that there’s a number of strong indications that our Pastafarian bretheren may, indeed, be our brothers and sisters in the LARD. The Pastafarian liturgy ends its prayers with a solemn “Ramen”. As we all know, ramen is generally served in a pork-based broth and usually features multiple slices of roast pork atop the noodles. At the very least, we know that the Pastafarians are not abstainers, or worse, vegetarians.
Furthermore, I realized that little is known about the trinitarian nature of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We know that he is part pasta (the noodly appendages), but we know little about the meatballs and almost nothing about the sauce (including whether or not the sauce actually manifests, much like the Holy Spirit.)
I offer the following interpretation, which would allow us to find common ground between Pastafarians and Bacontarians, which I call “The Carbonara Compromise”:
We believe in the LARD, holy and eternal.
We believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a manifestation of the LARD’s earthly power.
We believe the meatballs of the FSM are made of, or certainly contain pork and most assuredly were fried in holy LARD.
We believe the sauce that tops the FSM is a Carbonara Sauce, made from the LARD’s own holy pancetta.
We believe that any bacon-eating Pastafarian who is willing to meditate on the nature of the FSM’s meatballs and the eternal mystery of the Carbonara Sauce should be welcomed into our midst as a Bacontarian.
My bretheren, I offer this compromise like Luther’s 95 theses, stuck to a church door with bacon grease. I do not expect them to be uncontroversial, but I believe our Bacontarian faith is strong enough to survive the debate that is sure to follow. Ramen.
Your servant in the LARD,
-EthanZ
Praised by Arun, enjoyed by Arun, Steve and myself. Product of “Il Buffet da Pepi“. It’s not bacon, but it was tasty, and without a doubt the finest Trieste has to offer.
Royal Bacon Society - The Ultimate Bacon Resource
The Royal Bacon Society really is the ultimate bacon resource. They’re not kidding. Great Recipes, Awesome wallpapers and fun bacon-goodness. Go visit. It’s beautiful….
From the world of pure deliciousness: Baconaisse
I haven’t tried it, but i will.
Especially if someone finds me a supplier in europe so it doesn’t rot while in the han ds of the danish customs and excise authority.
In a last-ditch effort at reviving the former granditude (grandness + attitude = granditude) of this blog, i’ve decided to move the blog to Tumblr.
Hopefully the easy posting etc will mean shorter, but more frequent updates.
For now the blog will be updated here: http://bacontarian.tumblr.com/
If the experiment turns out to be a success, i’ll change that to http://bacontarian.com/
Also the rss feed will move to http://feeds.feedburner.com/bacontarian
New posts will also end up on twitter @bacontarian.com
Welcome! Again!
Take the stress out of making Bacon Vodka. Buy It!