Bacon

Since I was home by my self last weekend I decided to make a half-recipe, I knew I would eat the whole thing regardless of if I made a half recipe or the whole thing!  I had 2-year-aged Grafton cheddar, Hellman’s mayo, a jar of organic roasted red peppers, a good olive oil from Chile, freshly ground pepper, and cayenne. Here are my prepped ingredients:

The cheddar was somewhat crumbly, I ended up kind of crushing the larger crumbles against the grater. Good enough though.  I think I used a bit more than half the amount of roasted red pepper. I did remember in time to use half the amount of cayenne, which is good – easy to add more later if needed!

I mixed it up on a bowl, and gave it a taste – very creamy and flavorful.

Then I covered it and put it in the fridge for lunch the next day.

Next day, I fried up 2 hefty slices of Nueske’s applewood smoked bacon:

til done but not too done (a bit bendy still), and cut them into inch-long or so pieces. I topped seven gluten-free crackers (a brand called Glutino, which is very much like saltines, not like rice crackers) with a generous spoonful of the pimento cheese, laid a strip of bacon on top, put them out on a plate to admire, and then ate them all right away.

The tangy cheddar flavor went great with the sweet bacon, and the smoky notes from both the roasted red pepper and the light smoke from the bacon complemented eachother perfectly. The textures went well too – crunchy cracker, soft cheese spread, chewy bacon. A fine appetizer. Or in my case, a fine lunch.

The full recipe follows from page 167 of Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon:

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 pound sharp cheddar, coarsely grated (we use the two-year-old raw milk cheddar from Grafton Village)

1 cup mayonnaise (I prefer Hellmann’s up here: out West the same mayo is sold under the brand name Best Foods)

1/4 cup diced roasted red peppers

3/4 teaspoon olive oil

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper

Scant 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, or to taste

Pinch coarse sea salt

PROCEDURE:

Fold all the ingredients together in a mixing bowl.

Mix well.

Eat.

Repeat as regularly as you like. It’s addictive: as more than one person around here has said more than once, “It’s kind of good on pretty much everything, isn’t it?”

Serves . . . well, it’s kind of hard to say. A real addict could probably consume this entire recipe in a single setting. Being more conservative, let’s say it’s enough to serve 8 as an appetizer. You’ll probably have to test it on your family and friends to see how much they can eat!

My first venture into the shellfish arena of bacon book recipes. I love oysters in any form so I figured, hard to go wrong with this.

I got 5 freshly shucked oysters from our local wonderful seafood market, Monahan’s. The oysters were from Cape Cod, and I think Mike Monahan said they were called Wiona oysters, but it might have been Wionna.

I had 3 large free range eggs, and 3 thick slices of Nueske’s Applewood Smoked bacon.

My deviation from the recipe though (which I don’t recommend!) was to use Glutino gluten-free crackers, rather than oyster crackers. I don’t know of a gluten-free source for oyster crackers, yet.

Now, these are excellent crackers, the best I’ve found that are gluten-free when you want a cracker that is more like a saltine, instead of a rice cracker. But I learned, that if you can, use oyster crackers for this recipe, or, put a lot more effort than I did into crushing the crackers very finely. In hindsight, oyster crackers are very thin, and so crush up fine quite easily. (This is probably why they are called oyster crackers, eh? Duh.) And very fine is what you want. (Mine was still quite tasty, but I did not get a browned crust all over the oyster, which I think is the goal.)

So anyway, I coated the oysters in the too-chunky crushed crackers, and let them sit.

Meanwhile I chopped up the bacon, and fried it til crisp, and took it out of the pan, leaving the fat.

Then in went the oysters, for about 2 mintues as directed, and my cracker crust did get nicely golden brown, just not a uniform coating on the oysters.

Then this last part of the recipe was very quick – the oysters cooked for just 2 minutes, then in go the beaten eggs, bacon, salt, and pepper, and it only needed to cook for probably another 2 minutes, gently stirring, and it was done.

Was a hearty dish, more than I can usually face for breakfast but excellent for a brunch or lunch. I love the flavors of the oysters and bacon together. I had used 3 slices Nueske’s but I think only 2 are needed. (Nueske’s slices are fairly large though.) If you like oysters this is a great dish and super-quick to make.

The full recipe follows, from Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon: Stories of Pork Bellies, Hush Puppies, Rock ‘n’ Roll Music and Bacon Fat Mayonnaise, page 158:

Oysters, eggs and bacon in one really good all-American dish, Hangtown Fry is a California classic that’s long been one of the most popular items on the Roadhouse brunch menu. I love it because it’s simple to make, it’s delicious and it’s got a great story to boot. I like to use a dry-cured bacon like Broadbent’s because that’s the sort of intense, long-cured bacon that Gold Rush-era cooks would likely have been working with.

The story of Hangtown Fry takes you to a northern California town originally known as Old Dry Diggins, then as Hangtown and now Placerville. Back in Gold Rush days it was a prominent supply town – many of the area’s miners went there to restock and cut loose, and, while they were at it, often got themselves into a bit of trouble. The name Hangtown came about in the middle of the nineteenth century, when three bad guys were strung up on the branches of a big old oak in the center of town. I’ve been told that the stump of that old oak is still “stuck in the mud” (so to speak) in the basement of a bar called The Hangman’s Tree (which you’ll be able to find quickly by the body hanging from a noose off the front of the building).

The dish is said to have originated at the now-defunct El Dorado Hotel, just across the street from the hanging tree. Legend has it that a miner rolled into town with gold from a fresh strike and ordered the saloonkeeper to serve up his most special dish. The cook offered a choice of three high-end options: oysters, eggs (hard to transport and hence costly) and bacon. The miner told him to toss all three into one dish, and Hangtown Fry was born.

It’s a very versatile recipe – great for brunch, lunch or a light supper. Don’t skimp on the egg quality – remember, they were a luxury in mid-nineteenth-century Hangtown and remain a key component of the dish, not just a way to hold the oysters and bacon together.

Since I almost never see single-serving recipes in cookbooks, I decided to design this one that way. But of course the quantities are easily increased for any number of diners. You can vary the number of oysters according to how much gold you’ve got in your pouch.

INGREDIENTS:

4 tablespoons oyster crackers, crushed

3 to 6 fresh oysters, shucked

5 ounces sliced bacon (about 2 to 3 slices), chopped

1-1/2 teaspoons bacon fat

3 large eggs, beaten

1/8 teaspoon coarse sea salt

1/8 teaspoon freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper

PROCEDURE:

Dredge the oysters in the cracker crumbs. Leave them resting for at least 10 minutes so that the crumbs bond with the oysters.

In a non-stick skillet, cook the bacon over medium heat until crisp. Remove from the pan, leaving the bacon fat. Reduce the heat a bit and add the additional measure of fat. When hot, add the oysters and cook for about 2 minutes, stirring gently, until the crumb coating is lightly browned.

Add the beaten eggs, salt and pepper, and stir gently. Add the bacon. Cook over low heat, stirring gently every 30 seconds or so, until the eggs are done as you like them.

Serve with San Francisco sourdough toast and “Folsom Prison Blues” playing in the background.

Serves 1 generously as a main dish, or 2 as a smaller side dish

We throw a New Year’s Eve party every year, and while our guests bring lovely snacks to share we always make some too to seed the food table with. This year of course I decided mine should be bacon-based. So, I chose the Benedictine with Bacon recipe from the Bacon book.

But first, I also made one of my favorites that I’ve blogged about before – the bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with a sliver of Balinese long pepper. But this time I cut the dates in half, and used 1/3 slice of Broadbent’s bacon per half-date (although I should say, Broadbent’s slices are very long, so with a standard piece of bacon you may need half a slice per rather than a third of a slice). This way I could make a lot more of them. I used the full amount of long pepper in each half though – I love long pepper! And my guests seemed to as well. They were a big hit. Here’s an in-progress photo:

On to the Benedictine. Here’s my ingredients:

I decided to make a double recipe, but I didn’t need to – had plenty left over. Happily it tasted just as good the next day though.  I did make three variations, just in that I used regular bread for some, gluten-free bread for some, and for some I did not put the bacon on top, for the party go-ers who don’t eat pork. (The vegetarian ones were the only kind I had left near the end of the party – all the bacon-topped ones were snapped up fast!)

First you peel and de-seed the cucumbers. This always seems a bit odd, in that it seems like you’re getting rid of most of the cucumber when you take out all the “guts”, but these cukes were large and really there was plenty left.

Then I grated the cucumber, and put it in a sieve and squeezed out the water. And chopped up some onion.

The recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of chopped onion, for 1 cucumber and 10 oz of cream cheese. I was using two cukes and 20 oz of cream cheese, but decided to hold the line at 2 tablespoons of onion and I’m glad I did – that was plenty. Maybe my onion was extra powerful. But anyway, then I put the onion, cucumber, and 20 ounces of Zingerman’s Creamery cream cheese in the food processor and blended it til smooth, and then scooped it out into a bowl, ground in some fresh pepper, and probably 3/4 to 1 teaspoon of sea salt. (I’m a salt fiend.)

Then put it in the fridge for a couple hours. During that time, I cooked 8 slices of Broadbent’s bacon, on a rack in the oven, at 350 F, for 20 minutes or so. I watch it closely, since I’ve overcooked Broadbent’s before. It is a dry-cured bacon so has less water than conventional bacon, and cooks faster I find. And its a bit deceptive in how it looks, too – it gets stiff and dry when overdone, but doesn’t look burned, so in order to tell if its done I’m looking at both the color and the flexibility – I want to take it out while it still has some bend to it.

I patted the bacon with paper towel to take off some of the fat, and set it aside for a little while, until I was ready to assemble. Just before the party, I toasted some good white bread, and some gluten-free white bread too. (There is a bakery in Toledo that makes decent gluten-free bread that my grocery store carries, called Pure and Simple. It can’t approach the scrumptious-ness of real  bread, but its much better than some of the others we’ve tried.) I cut the crusts off just because it seemed the thing to do – maybe I was having flashbacks to a high tea I ate at Harrod’s in London when I was in high school. I put the two breads on three different plates (the third plate for the bacon-free), and took the Benedictine out of the fridge.

It had thickened some, but was still a bit runnier than I had thought it would be.  Maybe its because I was using Zingerman’s Creamery cream cheese – which has no guar gum, the standard thickener for commercial cream cheese. But it tasted wonderful – light, fresh, and cucumbery with a gentle onion bite – so it was way worth it to not have guar gum in there!

I spooned a bit onto each piece of toast (probably between 2 to 3 teaspoons per), broke the Broadbent’s up into inch-long pieces and placed a piece carefully on top, on two of the three plates, and served!

Here’s the snack table that we set out, and our guests quickly filled it with more:

And here’s the snack table near the end of the evening – the two plates of Benedictine with Bacon and the Bacon-Wrapped Dates with Long Pepper were emptied long ago, but the vegetarian plate is still hanging on. It was eaten too though, just not as quickly.

Here’s the full Benedictine recipe, from page 168-69 of Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon:

The credit for inventing Benedictine spread goes to Jennie Benedict, a seemingly pretty powerful personality who studied with Fannie Farmer and went on to become one of Louisville, Kentucky’s top caterers. She was the first woman to sit on a Board of Trade in the South. In 1902 she wrote a book called the Blue Ribbon Cook Book, in which she first described this spread. Over the last hundred years Benedictine has become to Louisville what paté is to Paris or baked beans are to Boston. Beyond that bit of background, I don’t have a huge heck of a lot to tell you about Benedictine other than that it’s really, really good and Louisvillians definitely do pretty uniformly seem to love it.
The first time I had it was at Lilly’s, which is one of the best restaurants in the city. It wasn’t on the menu but when I told Kathy Cary, the chef and owner, that I’d never eaten it she went straight to the kitchen and came back 10 minutes later with a plate of little Benedictine-filled finger sandwiches. I really liked the stuff, and I think pretty much anyone who likes cream cheese would like Benedictine. Every recipe calls for cream cheese, and they all have cucumber as well. Most have some onion. A few add other spices. The better the cream cheese and the cucumbers, the better it’s going to be. Many locals add green food coloring, which I think was probably a pretty common ingredient back in the early years of the twentieth century (color was an important part of the way people approached food in that era of “scientific cooking,” and the dishes of a meal were often color coded). Personally, I skip the green, but Kathy’s husband quickly reminded me that rather surreal green color is the one I’d see in most supermarket deli cases.

Part of why I like our Benedictine so much is because I’m so smitten with the traditional, hand-made cream cheese from Zingerman’s Creamery and this is a really good, regionally authentic way to eat it. I like to look at it as sort of a high-society, upper-South version of bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese (slices of pork instead of salmon makes sense when you’re hundreds of miles from the sea). The other reason is because it’s really good with bacon—Kathy made that clear by topping each of the little sandwiches with a half slice of the stuff. Which is why it’s in this book! I’d use Broadbent’s or Father’s to stay true to the Kentucky origins of the dish.

INGREDIENTS

1 large cucumber, peeled, seeded and grated

10 ounces Zingerman’s Creamery cream cheese

2 tablespoons grated onion

Coarse sea salt to taste

Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to taste

4 slices bacon

4 slices good white bread

PROCEDURE

Drain the grated cucumber in a fine-mesh sieve. Combine the cucumber, cream cheese and onion in a food processor. Transfer to a bowl and add salt and pepper. Cover and let the spread set up for a couple of hours, refrigerated, to assimilate the flavors. Remove from the refrigerator about 30 minutes before serving.
When you’re ready to serve, fry the bacon over medium heat until slightly crisp. While it’s cooking, toast the bread. When the bacon’s done, drain it (save that fat!) and cut the slices into quarters. When the toast is done, cut it into quarters as well, spread on the Benedictine and lay a bit of bacon on top. Serve on a genteel, socially acceptable platter!
Serves 4 as a side dish

This is not a bacon book recipe, but Fred Sauceman, who is a professor at East Tennessee State University (and is in the Bacon book, in the section about Chocolate Gravy), recently made this dish:

It’s a salad using these five artisanal bacons from the Bacon book, from five different states:

Benton’s (Tennessee), Broadbent (Kentucky), Edwards’ (Virginia), Arkansas Peppered, and Nueske’s (Wisconsin).

Fred elaborated: “We’ve served ‘bacon salads’; like this on several occasions, since guests really enjoy the bacon geography. In this case, I dressed the salad with a simple French vinaigrette: finely chopped shallots, red wine vinegar, Maille mustard, peanut oil, salt, and pepper. –Fred”

So, this is not actually a recipe from the Bacon book. Its a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated magazine (which they called French-style pot roast), which had the irresistible combination of using bacon in the recipe, and, calling for use of a large dutch oven (since I finally acquired an enameled dutch oven last week and was eager to use it). My husband and I made this dish together, which was helpful because there were lots of steps to follow. Not difficult, just involved. Which is why I call it weekend pot roast – I could only make it on a weekend. We started at 12:45, and we sat down to eat at 6:15. However a lot of that time was just cooking time.

Here’s most of my ingredients, minus the wine and the roast.

The main ingredient in pot roast, of course, was the 4lb boneless chuck eye roast. First I spent some time cutting out any large chunks of fat that were easily reachable, then salted it with a celtic sea salt and let it sit for an hour. Then patted it dry and tied it with butchers string.

Bacon took a backseat rather than being the star of the show, but was still one of the “supports” in the building of an excellent dish! Here’s my hubbie dicing it, then it was sauteed, removed from the pot, and then I browned the meat in the bacon fat. (A splatter guard is helpful for this – the high heat needed for browning does make the fat fly.)

I used Vande Rose bacon, which I had never had before. Was nicely meaty and mild flavored. Those four slices resulted in a very nice amount of fat, more than I needed for browning the roast in.

Here’s the roast when I first put it in the pot to brown.

When it was browned on all sides I pulled the meat out of the pot. Then sauteed the diced onions and garlic, added the other broth ingredients (including a bottle of a Cotes du Rhone red wine, reduced down to 2 cups first, and the bacon goes back in too), and put the meat back in the pot, put the lid on of course, and baked it in the oven at 300 F for a couple hours.

After 2 hours of cooking, you add the carrots and put it back in for another hour or so, and in the meantime you cook the pearl onions and mushrooms in a pan.

When the roast is done cooking, you pull the meat out of the sauce (temporarily), add the pearl onions and mushrooms and a little gelatin to the sauce to thicken it. Then you put it all in a serving dish.

We served it with white rice and a side of steamed greens, was excellent. Very flavorful, and good textures too – not mushy, as pot roast and veggies can easily be!

A chilly Sunday afternoon seemed like the right time for this recipe. First, I started the grits. I did not have blue grits, so I used the Anson Mills slow-cooking yellow grits that I had. I used 3/4 cup of the dry grits to 3 cups water, for 2 adults, with about 1/4 teaspoon salt. I cooked them for 3 hours on very low flame. I eventually gave up on not having the bottom stuck on the pan at all – even if I stirred every 10 minutes it still eventually got a coating on the bottom. Not burned, just coated. So I knew that would be a “soaker” on cleanup… Here’s a “before” shot:

After 3 hours of cooking on low the grits were quite smooth:

When the grits were done I started the rest of the process. Here’s the bluefish from our awesome local fish market, Monahan’s, and three slices of medium-thick Edwards bacon:

But before we get to that, a little segue – for inspiration to tackle cooking a fatty fish, here’s a recipe within a recipe – a very tasty cocktail my husband made up on the spot, he called it the “Sunday Surprise” and handed it to me as I was unwrapping the fish, was quite good:

1 oz tequila gold
3/4 oz lime juice
3/4 oz Cointreau
3 oz mango juice

Nice. While enjoying my cocktail, I cooked 3 slices of Edwards bacon in my large iron skillet.

I pulled them out when done, and chopped them up and set them aside. I left in all the bacon fat, and put in the two 1/2-pound fillets of bluefish, skin side down, and covered it with my round mesh splatter-protector. Bluefish is a fatty fish, so it did splutter a lot while cooking! I didn’t time it exactly, but the fish took a little longer to cook than I thought it would, over medium heat, maybe 10 minutes. I think because the fillets were fairly thick on one end. I ended up flipping them more than once; I think I flipped it too early the first time. Resist the urge for early flipping. I tested them with a fork a few times and finally was satisfied that they were done.

While the fish was cooking, I was also steaming some brussel sprouts I had bought the day before at the farmer’s market, from a local organic farm. They only needed about 5 minutes of steaming, and then I mixed them with a little sea salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar and they were good to go.

I warmed a couple plates in the oven, spread out some grits on each plate, and put a serving of brussels on the side, as well as some pomegranite seeds – we had a ripe one and I thought the seeds would look pretty with the brussels.

(Next time I think I’d sprinkle a little more salt, and a little pepper, on top of the grits once on the plate, but before putting the fish on top.)

Then I put the fish down on top of the grits, sprinkled it with the chopped bacon, and sat down to a feast!

The full recipe follows, from page 186-187 of Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon by Ari Weinzweig:

Bluefish Fried in Bacon with Blue Grits

Bluefish is one of my all-time favorite foods. But once you get off the East Coast it seems like hardly anyone knows it. This is a simple preparation, it has a great name, it’s pretty eye-catching on the plate and, most importantly, it tastes extremely terrifically good. I made it with the really superb, organic, stone-ground blue grits that we get from Glenn Roberts’ Anson Mills in South Carolina. Given that the old corn varieties ranged in color from white to red to yellow to blue and most everything in between (or even all on one cob—try Glenn’s multi-colored “speckled grits” too!), blue grits really aren’t all that strange. It’ll mess up your all-blue color scheme, but this is also good with cooked greens on the side. To get back into the blue end of the spectrum you can follow with fresh blueberries and a dollop of fresh whipped cream (no bacon) for dessert!

For the grits
INGREDIENTS
Since the cooking time is the most challenging element of this recipe, feel free to prepare a larger portion than you actually need and save some for later.

4 cups cold water

1 cup Anson Mills blue grits

1/2 teaspoon coarse sea salt

PROCEDURE
Heat the water in a heavy four-quart stockpot. Start mixing in the grits while the water warms up, stirring regularly—I find it infinitely easier to get lump-free grits this way. Add salt and stir well. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat as low as possible. Stir a few more times, cover and cook on low for as long as you can—a good 2 to 4 hours—the long, slow cooking releases the starches and makes the grits really creamy. Once you get them cooking there’s really nothing to do but stir every 15 minutes or so.

For the fish
When the grits are good and creamy and you’re ready to eat, you can start the fish.

INGREDIENTS:
4 ounces sliced bacon (about 2 to 3 slices)(I like the dry-cured Edwards’ bacon for this one)

2 (1/2 pound) fillets fresh bluefish

Coarse sea salt to taste

Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to taste

Extra virgin olive oil (optional)

PROCEDURE:

Fry the bacon in a heavy-bottomed skillet over moderate heat. Remove the bacon from the pan and drain, leaving the fat in the pan. Add the fish to the still-hot bacon fat in the skillet, skin side down (I think the skin is the best part!). Cook the fish until the skin is browned, then flip and cook quickly on the other side. If you need more fat, add a glug from your reserves or use a bit of olive oil. While the fish is cooking, chop the bacon coarsely and set aside. When the fish is almost done, set the grits into a couple of warm bowls. Place the fish on top, skin side down. Sprinkle the fat over the whole thing and top with salt, pepper and chopped bacon.
Serves 2 as a main course