I went to Monahan’s fish market, and got three Atlantic oysters (from Cape Cod – I think they were called Wiona but it might have been Wionna), and three Littleneck clams, all fresh and they shucked them for me and put them in containers with their juice.

I had Nueske’s applewood smoked bacon, sliced medium-thick. I cut three slices in half.

Here’s the raw ingredients; the oysters are larger than the clams, they’re the lighter colored ones, on the left. I preheated the broiler to 500.

I wrapped the shellfish – the bacon was thick and the shellfish small and slippery, so I did not wrap them tightly – about 1-1/2 times around with the half slice of Nueske’s. Using a toothpick to hold it together was essential. The oysters were about twice as large as the clams so easier to wrap.

The clams are smaller, they are the row on the left, oysters on the right.

A closer look at the wrapped oysters.

I put them on a piece of tin foil right on the surface of the baking sheet, I did not use a rack.

I broiled them 5 minutes, then flipped them, and broiled 5 minutes more. They gave off a surprising amount of juice – maybe because I’m used to doing this with dates and prunes!

Took them out, let them cool a minute or two, and then dove in.

A nice chewy, juicy, meaty mouthful. Eating them side by side, I can say that the oysters really shone – their flavor came through very well and  was a wonderful complementary flavor with the mild, lightly smokey Nueske’s. The clam flavor was harder to find, it got a bit lost in the bacon. That said, I still ate them all, each a nicely textured, flavorful mouthful!

So I would definitely make the bacon wrapped oysters again for an appetizer. Yum. And if you have an abundance of clams, this is a fine way to go as well, it’s just a more subtle flavor.

The recipe follows, from Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon, pages 163-165:

ANGELS ON HORSEBACK

The angels, in this case, are oysters — their little frilly flaps get all fluffy and angelically winglike under the heat of the broiler. Angels on Horseback is often presented as fancy food, but it’s in really basic books too, like V. M. Sherlock’s Apalachicola Seafood Recipes — a small, softcover, brown pamphlety thing that I like a lot. Ms. Sherlock calls them by the unfancy name “broiled oysters,” which just reinforces my belief that they’re really a pretty darned down-to-earth way to eat. I like to use Arkansas long pepper bacon—it’s got a nice bit of spice, but the moderate smoke level keeps the wood from completely overtaking the dish. Other bacons from the lighter smoke end of the spectrum, like Vande Rose, Nodine’s and Nueske’s, will also work well. As for the angels, any good oyster will work. I love Apalachicolas, which we bring to the Roadhouse regularly from Florida. I’ll just share this note from Sherlock, who wrote that, “Throughout the ages, men have argued over the superior flavor of oysters of their regions, but until they have tasted the Apalachicola oyster, they’re in no position to judge.”

Ingredients:

8 oysters, shucked

4 slices bacon, cut in half crosswise

Procedure:

Heat the broiler.

Wrap a half-slice of bacon around each oyster and then run a toothpick through the whole thing to hold it together. Place on a baking sheet, run it under the broiler and cook until the bacon is done, giving it a turn halfway through. If you want the bacon well done you can cook it part way in a pan before wrapping it around the oysters.

Cook carefully: as V. M. Sherlock says, “Local appetites may differ but most will agree that you should never wash an oyster and never overcook one.”

CLAM PIGS

This is the same dish as Angels on Horseback, but made with fresh clams instead of oysters. Gotta love the name, which I came across in Sherlock’s Apalachicola cookbook!

Ingredients:

8 fresh clams, shucked
4 slices bacon, cut in half crosswise

Procedure:

Follow the instructions for Angels on Horseback, substituting the raw clams for oysters.

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!

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

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

Here are my ingredients – Arkansas peppered bacon and prunes, and toothpics.

The prunes were smaller but denser than the dates, and the half-slices of bacon wrapped around sometimes more like 1.5 to 2 times. I did not precook the bacon, but those who like their bacon very well done might consider cooking it partway before wrapping them. It only took a few minutes of prep, and then my wrapped prunes were ready to roll:

I preheated the oven itself to 500 F, then changed it to broil and put in the bacon-wrapped prunes, but lowered the broil temperature to 400 F. So it cooked a bit slower and took a bit longer (maybe 15 minutes – I flipped them at about 7-8 minutes), which I think helped cook the inner layers. Here they are fresh from the oven:

I let them sit for 5 minutes or so, and then dove in and tried one. Well, two. Or maybe three. I liked the combo of the smoky peppery bacon with the chewy, tart, complex flavor of the prunes. Bacon-wrapped dates are almost like eating bacon-candy, even with the long pepper stuffed inside. This was much more savory. The Arkansas peppered bacon went very well with the prunes, gave them more kick.  I restrained myself and brought the rest to an open house, they were very well received!

The recipe follows, from page 164 of Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon:

Devils on Horseback

These are made in the same manner as Angels on Horseback (bacon-wrapped oysters), except that the oysters are replaced by dark Devils—in this case, prunes. Pork and prunes are a classic combination found in all sorts of big-flavored dishes from southwestern France, and this easy-to-make appetizer delivers that same wonderful flavor pairing to your guests in mere minutes! Of course you know already that I’m going to say you have to find really good ingredients to work with—my favorites are the prunes from Agen in France, but I don’t think you can get them in the U.S. anymore. If you find a variety that’s better than the standard supermarket grade, grab it. I like to make this dish with one of the smoky, dry-cured bacons to balance the sweetness of the dried fruit.

INGREDIENTS:

8 really good prunes, pitted

4 slices bacon, cut in half crosswise

PROCEDURE:

Heat the broiler.

Wrap a half-slice of bacon around each prune and then run a toothpick through the whole thing to hold it together. Place on a baking sheet, run it under the broiler and cook until the bacon is done, turning the “devils” halfway through the cooking. Again, if you want the bacon well done, you’ll do better to cook it partially through on its own before you do the wrapping.

I had picked up some Arkansas Peppered bacon at Zingerman’s Deli yesterday, sliced medium-thick.

I cooked the bacon on a rack on a cookie sheet in the oven – put it in a cold oven and then turned the oven on to 350, and cooked it for about half an hour – I took it out when the bacon was still bendable, not crisp. I had the rest of the ingredients on hand. I have to admit, this was the first time I had steamed potatoes, OVER salted water, rather than boiling them IN salted water. It worked fine! Although I did cut the potatoes into large chunks before I steamed them, because of the wide disparity in sizes – some of the potatoes were quarter-sized, others were quite large.  I chopped up celery, onion, and a red pepper as called for. The chicken stock was homemade – I make large batches and freeze quarts of it, very handy to have around and so much tastier than what you can buy in the supermarket. The flour was Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Gluten Free, since my husband can’t eat wheat.

The cliff-hanger with this recipe was, would the roux thicken, with gluten free flour?

Here’s all the ingredients, ready to roll:

Cooking the onions/peppers/celery, in 4 tablespoons (yowza) of bacon fat,  in the largest iron skillet I have:

I added the all-purpose gluten free flour, and slowly added the chicken broth, and it did thicken! Not quite as much as a regular flour roux, so I used more like 1 cup of the chicken broth rather than 1.5 cups, but it was thickening:

When it was nice and thick I stirred in the bacon, and potatoes, and since I didn’t have any heavy cream I used a bit of 2% milk instead. Seemed to work just fine!

I also made a quick soup, using the chicken broth I had left over, in the blender with kale and turnip greens I had previously harvested from my garden and blanched and frozen. I cooked up some chopped onions and garlic (both of which I had also grown in my garden), in butter, and added that to the blender too with a bit of salt and a bit of celery seed. Blended it for a good 5 minutes to break down the fibers of the kale. Then put it in a pot with about half a cup of milk, heated it gently, and it was really tasty.

So, here’s dinner, my husband and I enjoyed it very much, and we have some lovely leftovers for brunch tomorrow!

Below is the full recipe, from page  157 of Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon by Ari Weinzweig:

This hash has turned out to be a hit with most everyone who’s had it. It’s an excellent way to take advantage of the big flavor of top-of-the-line bacons. The bacon is the headliner rather than just a couple of strips alongside another main dish. I like making it with the dry-cured intensity of the Broadbent’s, Benton’s, Father’s or Edwards’, but it really would work with any good bacon.

You can make the recipe a day or two in advance if you like, then reheat it in a skillet when you’re ready to serve. Regardless, you’ll want to cook both the bacon and potatoes and let them cool before you move on to the rest of the recipe. Serve with rye toast and a couple of poached eggs if you like, as well.

INGREDIENTS:

4 tablespoons rendered bacon fat

1 medium onion, coarsely chopped

1 medium red bell pepper, coarsely chopped

1 stalk celery, coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons flour

1-1/2 cups chicken broth

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

10 ounces sliced bacon (about 5 to 7 slices), lightly cooked and chopped

2 pounds potatoes (I like Yukon Golds, German Butterballs or others of that ilk), steamed over salted water until tender, then diced with the skins on

1/4 cup heavy cream

Coarse sea salt to taste

Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to taste

PROCEDURE:

Melt the bacon fat in a large skillet over moderate heat. Add the onion, bell pepper and celery and cook, covered, for 5 to 6 minutes, until soft.

Sprinkle the flour over the wilted vegetables and stir well to avoid lumps. Cook for another 4 to 5 minutes, stirring constantly to keep from sticking, until the flour blends with the bacon fat into a thickened roux.

Add the broth, a bit at a time, stirring well after each addition so the mixture stays smooth and creamy. The sauce should coat the back of your spoon before you add more liquid. Stir in the Worcestershire sauce.

Continue simmering the sauce over moderate heat until it thickens, about 5 minutes. Add the bacon and potatoes and mix well. Add the cream and cook, stirring, a few more minutes. Stir in salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

Serve immediately, or cool and reheat in a skillet until you get a nice golden brown crust.

Serves 4 to 6 as a main dish

The recipe was not difficult, in that it did not involve any tricky techniques or extra-careful cooking; it just had a lot of ingredients and several steps. First I did a lot of chopping, and here’s my assembly of the ingredients, except the chicken. For the hot pepper flakes I used my own, from some tiny round  hot peppers I grew last summer. The garlic I grew also, as well as the parsley, which is still thriving in my front yard – it will withstand the frost for a little while. The bread is gluten free, which Arbor Farms buys from a bakery in Toledo.

I did skip a step, in that I did not need to pre-cook any bacon; I already had a jar of bacon fat, of exclusively artisanal bacons from all my experiments, so I was confident I had some tasty fat already. I put the melted bacon fat in the bottom of a pyrex dish, and lined it with the bread, and meanwhile cooked up the onions/celery/apples/currants/lemon zest/hot pepper flakes/other spices.

Then I put the apples/onion mixture over the bread, and prepped the chicken, rubbed on more of the melted bacon fat, and the spicy coffee spice rub, and poured the lemon juice over. And last, laid the strips of Benton’s bacon on top.

It smelled wonderful as soon as it started cooking! We also had some veggies roasting in the oven in another pan, so I had to cook it a bit longer overall, probably more like 80 to 90 minutes instead of an hour. But I did pull the bacon off to the side after 45 minutes as recommended, and the chicken skin did get nice and crispy. Here’s how it looked when just out of the oven:

I pulled the chicken off and let it rest on a cuttingboard for 10 minutes, and meanwhile broke up the strips of bacon onto the “stuffing” and then served the stuffing onto plates. Added pieces of chicken (and some of the veggies we roasted on the side), and enjoyed a fabulous dinner. Was rich, spicy but not too hot, complex flavored and all-around good. I will make it again. It is not a dish to make when you’re pressed for time though. The full recipe is below, enjoy!

From page 200 of Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon by Ari Weinzweig:

Lex’s Roast Chicken with Bacon and Spicy Coffee Spice Rub

My friend Lex Alexander turned me on to this recipe about 10 years ago. It’s in Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating and has become one of the staples of our catering work here at Zingerman’s. I loved it from day one because it’s such a nice way to make a mini-Thanksgiving dinner without having to spend two days cooking: the chicken juices drip down on the bread beneath it in the roasting dish, essentially creating a low-labor but high-flavor version of stuffing (which I love!). In working on this book it dawned on me that getting bacon involved in the dish would be a big win. So here it is, Lex’s chicken take two . . . this time with bacon.

I also decided to add a spice rub that Roadhouse chef and managing partner Alex Young did for Esquire magazine a few years ago. Zingerman’s Spicy Coffee Spice Rub is a blend of ground Roadhouse Joe coffee, Urfa red pepper from Turkey, Tellicherry black pepper, cloves and sea salt. I really like the coffee, clove and bacon blend of flavors—in some strange way it makes me think about a spicy, exotic version of red eye gravy. It’s appropriate, too, since Lex’s current life revolves a lot around the very fine coffee shop—called 3 Cups—he owns in Chapel Hill, NC. Having tried the dish with a number of different bacons, we settled on Allan Benton’s—its big smoky favor and silky fat served the dish well!
It should probably go without saying, but the better the chicken, the better the dish. I use free-range birds we buy from Amish farmers in Indiana. The chicken smells great in the oven, too — the aromas of roasting chicken and bacon both make me want to eat as soon as the thing starts cooking.

Ingredients:

1-1/4 pounds sliced Benton’s bacon (about 12 slices)

2 large Spanish onions (about 1-1/2 pounds), cut in half lengthwise and sliced into thin half circles

4 stalks celery, cut into 1/8-inch slices

1-1/2 pounds tart apples (about 3 medium), 1/2-inch dice, skins on

1 scant cup dried currants

1 clove fresh garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme or 1 tablespoon fresh thyme

1 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes (preferably Marash)

1 tablespoon lemon zest

1 teaspoon coarse sea salt

2 teaspoons freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper

1/4 cup parsley, chopped, rinsed and squeezed dry

1/2 loaf leftover country bread, such as a good crusty white country loaf, sliced 3/4-inch thick. If the bread is still fresh and soft, slice it and let it dry on the counter for a few hours before using.

1 roasting chicken (3 to 4 pounds), split in half and backbone removed

5 tablespoons Zingerman’s Spicy Coffee Spice Rub (or you can make your own—the ingredients are listed above)

1/4 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice

Procedure:

Preheat oven to 400°F

Arrange 6 of the bacon slices on a 1/4-inch-deep baking sheet. Bake for 20 minutes, or until the bacon is crisp and most of its fat is rendered. Remove the baking sheet carefully from the oven. Drain bacon on paper towels and reserve for another use. When the fat cools a bit, pour into a Pyrex measuring cup. You should have about 1/2 cup.

Heat 1/4 cup of the fat in a large skillet over low heat. Add the onion and celery. Cover and sweat, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes or until soft.
Add the apple, currants, garlic, thyme, red pepper flakes, lemon zest, salt and black pepper. Stir to mix. Cook, covered, until the onions and celery are translucent, about 5 to 7 more minutes. Remove from heat, stir in the parsley, and set aside.

Lightly brush the bottom and sides of a 15-inch oval roasting pan with 1 tablespoon of the rendered bacon fat. Arrange the bread slices to cover the entire bottom of the baking dish. (If the bread is too big to fit easily, simply cut the slices into smaller pieces so that they tile the entire bottom of the dish properly.)

Layer the onion mixture atop the bread. Place the chicken, skin side up, over the onion mixture and bread. Rub it with 2 tablespoons of bacon fat and 4 tablespoons of Coffee Spice Rub. Pour the lemon juice over the chicken, then lay the remaining bacon slices across the top of the chicken.

Place the entire dish in the oven and cook, uncovered. After 45 minutes or so, check that the bacon has crisped on top of the chicken. Once it has, pull it off the chicken and lay it directly onto the bread mixture so the chicken can brown. Change the oven function to broil, but continue at 400 degrees F. The chicken should be done in 15 to 20 minutes: the skin should be nicely crisped and its juices should run clear when the bird is pricked with a fork.

Remove the pan from the oven. Sprinkle the whole dish with 1 tablespoon Coffee Spice Rub and let stand for a few minutes. Remove the chicken to a cutting board and cut into quarters. Draw a sharp knife through the bacon, bread and onion mixture to break it up. Spoon some of the mixture onto each plate and place the chicken on top.

Serves 4 as a main course

For bacon I had three slices of Edwards bacon. Sliced medium-thick, and so long that they can’t fit in my largest skillet! And since they aren’t pumped full of water they did not really shrink, so in the end I cut them in half so the outside ends could be moved into the middle.

Edwards' dry-cured bacon

I used a couple of slices of Zingerman’s farm bread, which was fresh but I put the slices out on the counter for a couple hours to “stale” them up a bit.

Edwards’ bacon I find, I am particularly prone to overcooking.  Still very edible, just crunchier than I mean for it to be. I pulled out the bacon, and in went the bread, and after a minute, I added 2 tablespoons of milk, too, which hissed and bubbled in the hot pan, and sprinkled the bread with a bit of salt.

Farm bread in the pan with bacon fat and a little milk

The first side got a lot more fat than the second side, but I did not add any more, I figured the first side had absorbed plenty for both! The cooking time was short of course. In the meantime, for a side dish I was also heating up some beets, and kale, from my garden, which I had cooked the night before.

When toasty on both sides (the first side completely golden brown from all that bacon fat, and milk too I suppose, and the second side toasted in areas), I removed the bread from the pan, drizzled it and the bacon with real maple syrup, and ate while hot. I ended up putting the bacon on top of the bread. It was a little decadent feeling, but holding firmly in mind that bacon fat from well treated, naturally raised pigs is better for you than butter, I told myself it was not THAT decadent, really. And its great comfort food.

American Fried Bread

This recipe is written up on page 162 of Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon, but I’ve covered all the specifics above. Ari does suggest using Zingerman’s Roadhouse bread (also known as Thirded Bread or Rye ‘n’ Injun bread in the 18th and 19 centuries) if you can get it!

First, a confession – I had planned to make this recipe on a Saturday so I could buy the slow-cooking grits per the book’s recommendation, but when I went to Zingerman’s Deli on Saturday morning, after my habitual stop at the nearby Farmer’s Market, I accidentally bought a can of the quick-cooking grits, rather than the slow ones, and didn’t realize it til I got home. At which point, rather than make another round trip in to town, I decided to use what I had. So they cooked for at least an  hour I’d say, but not 4 hours. They were good; I have no doubt the slow-cooking ones are even better.

I also got the Benton’s bacon from Zingerman’s Deli. Sliced medium-thick. I used a wee bit more than the recipe called for – mmm, bacon.

Nicely colorful ingredients – the celery/onion/red pepper. I bought 18 large shrimp instead of the 12 jumbo, seemed to work out fine. And, since my husband can’t eat gluten, I used all purpose gluten-free flour in the pan to create the sauce – it seemed to do ok, although might not have been as thick as the regular flour version would be.

It worked fine to cook the shrimp for just a minute or two, and then shell and clean them after that – maybe that is a common way to do it, but I never had. I’ve always shelled and cleaned shrimp raw. I liked this method.

It was fun to tie the shrimp shells in the cheesecloth – I dont know why. Maybe because it felt old fashioned. Our big iron skillet was perfect for this dish. I did need to add maybe 1/4 cup more water at one point, but not much.

It cooked up easily, we heated the plates as directed, served the grits and then the shrimp and sauce on top, and ate it out on our back deck. Was scrumptious. And more than enough leftovers for lunch the next day.

Shrimp and Grits with Benton’s Bacon
From page 205 of Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon by Ari Weinzweig:

Ingredients:

For the grits:
4 cups water
1 cup coarse-ground grits
3/4 teaspoon coarse sea salt
2 tablespoons butter

For the shrimp sauce:
4 ounces (about 2 to 3 slices) bacon, diced
12 fresh shell-on jumbo shrimp
1/2 teaspoon coarse sea salt, plus additional to taste
1/2 stalk celery, coarsely chopped
1 small sweet onion, coarsely chopped
1 large red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1 clove fresh garlic, chopped fine
1 tablespoon flour
2 cups water
2 bay leaves
Hot red pepper flakes (preferably Marash), to taste
Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to taste

Procedure:

Heat the water in a large pot over high heat. Add the grits before it begins to boil, stirring well. Continue stirring while the pot comes to a boil, then reduce the heat. Add the salt and butter, stirring for a minute to melt the butter. Hold the pot at a low boil, stirring the grits regularly until they begin to thicken (3 to 5 minutes).

Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, loosely covered, for 30 to 60 minutes – or longer still – until grits reach desired doneness. The longer you cook ‘em, the better they’ll get. Stir fairly often to avoid clumping and sticking.

While the grits are cooking, start the sauce.

Cook the bacon in a 13-inch skillet over medium heat for a few minutes until lightly cooked and the fat is rendered. Remove half the bacon from the pan and reserve, leaving the other half in the skillet with the fat.

Add the shrimp to the skillet, sprinkle with salt and saute briefly so that they’re very lightly cooked – but not cooked through – on each side (probably less than a minute per side). Remove shrimp to a platter and set aside.

In the same skillet, saute the onion, celery, red bell pepper, and garlic until the vegetables are soft and lightly browned, 10 to 12 minutes. Meanwhile, shell and clean the shrimp, reserving the shells and tying them in a cheesecloth bundle.

Sift the flour directly over the vegetables and give it a good stir until it dissolves. Slowly add in the water, mixing constantly, so that it forms a smooth sauce. Bring the mixture to a high simmer and cook for a couple of minutes, stirring steadily.

Add the shrimp shell bundle, the bay leaves, and red pepper flakes. Keep at a low simmer for 15 to 30 minutes or until the grits (which are cooking in the other pot) are almost ready. Add additional water if the sauce gets too thick. It should be the texture of a moderately thick pasta sauce.

Cut the peeled and cleaned shrimp into 1-inch pieces. (You can leave them whole if your prefer, but I like the more effective shrimp distribution that you get from having smaller pieces.) Return to the sauce and simmer for a few more minutes. Remove and discard the shells. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Ladle the cooked grits onto warm plates. Top with the shrimp sauce, sprinkle on the reserved fried bacon and serve hot.

Serves 3 to 4 as a main course

The bacon slices are very impressive – thick and meaty, a good ten inches long, and almost 2 inches wide. I pulled out my largest skillet, and they barely fit! First I fried the bacon until fairly crisp, but I did not make the mistake I made with Benton’s before of cooking it too long (it cooks faster than your conventional bacon, which has a lot of water in it), and so took it out of the skillet while it still had some bend to it – it seems to crisp up a little more even after it’s out of the pan.

The bacon shrunk a bit while cooking, but not very much! And it left a nice amount of fat behind. I chopped the bacon coarsely and set it aside.

Meanwhile I’d been cooking the gluten-free rice penne pasta in a large pot of salted water. (We’ve found Tinkyada brand rice pasta to hold up the best.) I drained it while it was still a bit hard – I have to keep tasting pasta almost every minute after the first 5 minutes of cooking. I’m classic for overcooking any pasta, and especially for rice pasta it’s essential not to overcook it since it disintegrates under any kind of pressure after that. The bag’s cooking directions are ridiculous – it says cook for 15-17 minutes, and I find it’s usually done in 10. Anyway, I managed not to overcook the pasta, drained it, and then put it right in the skillet with all the bacon fat, and added in the chopped bacon too.

It sizzled and I found it was necessary to keep stirring it pretty vigorously – the pasta was absorbing all the bacon fat at an amazing rate, and, wanting to stick to the bottom of the well-seasoned iron skillet at the same time. I stirred it over medium heat for a couple minutes, and then ground some pepper over the top, a bit more salt, and served it into bowls.

We had some fresh greens on the side, and ate every morsel! I liked the flavor a lot – an extremely simple dish but the smoky, salty flavor of the Benton’s really made it rich and satisfying. We thought maybe next time we’d toss in a bit of this or that for variety – maybe a few grape tomatoes, sliced in half – but it’s also quite good just on it’s own. As Ari mentions in the book, this really good dish gives a new meaning to “fast food”.

Recipe follows, from page 188, Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon: Stories of Pork Bellies, Hush Puppies, Rock ‘n’ Roll Music and Bacon Fat Mayonnaise:

Ingredients:

1/2 pound really good macaroni (I swear by the Martelli family’s)
8 ounces sliced bacon (about 4 to 6 slices)(I like Benton’s because the simplicity of the dish gets its full smokiness out front)
Coarse sea salt to taste
Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to taste

Procedure:

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add lots of salt, then pasta. Stir well.

While the pasta is cooking, fry the bacon in a large skillet over medium heat until done. Remove the bacon from the pan, reserving the hot fat in the skillet. Chop the bacon and stand by. As soon as the pasta is almost al dente, drain it well and add it to the skillet along with the bacon. Toss well and cook for another minute or two, so that the grease really cooks into the macaroni. Season with salt and plenty of black pepper to taste. Serve immediately in hot bowls.

Optional additions:

“Enh,” Meg wrote me a day or so after she’d sent the original recipe (the word means “yes”  in Ojibway). “Try the mac and grease with a few big garden tomatoes cut into 1-inch cubes.” It’s incredibly simple—just chunks of really good tomato tossed into the hot bacon fat for a minute or two with some salt before the pasta goes into the skillet. “The tomatoes,” she said, should “get hot but not saucy, if you know what I mean. I did, and I made the dish and it was, again, in its simplicity, really, really good. Of course it’s only worth doing when the tomatoes are in season. The rest of the year you could gussy up your Mac and Grease by tossing in chopped vegetables or greens of most any sort, and cooking until they’re somewhere between soft and golden brown. Thinking more exotically, I want to throw chopped hickory nuts on top, too. You, of course, can do whatever you like. Like most pasta dishes, this one lends itself to hundreds of variations.

Serves 2 as a main course, or 4 as a side dish