Peter Kaminsky - Bacon Nation

Photography by Lucy Schaeffer

Workman Publishing
New York

For Honeybunch

Peter

For my bacon-loving sons, Nick and Will Reiter

Marie

Acknowledgments

Thanks and appreciation go to:

Our editor Suzanne Rafer for believing in us and making our book better and more bacony.

Our agent, Mark Reiter, for the original bacon bracket that started it all and (since hes married to one of us) for taste-testing each recipe and always saying, Yes, bacon!

Our graphic team: Sarah Smith for a beautiful design, and Lucy Schaeffer, Jamie Kimm, and Sara Abalan for photographs that make us all hungry.

At Workman: Lisa Hollander, Anne Kerman, Melissa Lucier, Kate Karol, Selina Meere, Jessica Wiener, Bob Miller, Walter Weintz, Page Edmunds, and David Schiller. And to Peter Workman for supporting this book from the very beginning.

For technical and worldly wisdom: Nicholas Rama, Bill Schreiber, Pamela Johnson, Allan Benton, Sam Edwards III, Rick Lowry, Tanya L. Nueske, Ronny and Beth Drennan, Andrew Thielen, and the Sloan sisters of Swiss Meats and Sausage Company.

Special shout-outs to: Molly Kay Frandson for helping on the therewillbebacon.com blog; Workmans own Susan Bolotin for rolling up her sleeves to try out the Butternut Squash and Bacon Galette, and Chef Robert Wiedmaier for walking us carefully through his bacon-laced Coq Au Vin.

Contents

Introduction:

Blessed by Bacon

This is a book by bacon lovers for bacon lovers. When it comes to bacon, there are just two kinds of people in the world: those who adore bacon and those who have never eaten it. We definitely belong to the first group of people. And as for all those people who havent tried bacon, say, vegetarians or folks who dont eat pork for religious reasons, while they may not eat bacon, thats not to say that they wouldnt love it if they did. They would.

To our way of thinking, bacon is the equal of pricey Prigord truffles, sybaritic Spanish saffron, and conspicuously consumed Caspian caviar. And, with bacon, just as we do before adding these more luxurious groceries to a recipe, we ask ourselves, How much does it take to add just the right amount of flavor and texture? As resourceful chefs have long known, a little bacon can turn a dish from blah to beautiful. Crumbled into a green salad, wrapped around a succulent shrimp, thrown into a pot of bubbling beans, or laid over a breast of spring chicken while it roasts in the oven, bacon takes good food and makes it fun.

Theres a good and a bad side to the ability of bacon to improve food. You want to taste the bacon but you also want to know what else is in the dish so that the bacon subtly enhances rather than taking over. Bacon is not just smoky flavor or crispy texture. It is a complex ingredient. Great bacon starts with porky meatiness, an example of the supersavory flavor known as umami (from the Japanese word for yummy) that we find so satiating. Its saltinessjust like table saltpushes forward the other flavors in a recipe. Curing, aging, and cooking bacon brings out hundreds of delicious flavor compounds.

And then there is crunchiness. For the last half million years or soever since the discovery of fire, when we started preparing meat by cooking it and creating a perfectly charred crusthumans have craved crunchiness. There is nothing more cracklingly crunchy than a perfectly cooked piece of bacon. It satisfies.

As you know from food television, there are loads of places where people wolf down mega-calorie recipes made with unremarkable ingredients smothered with gobs of gloppy cheese and mucho bacon. It almost doesnt matter if your favorite double-wide TV host orders a cheeseburger, pizza, club sandwich, chefs salad, or a three-thousand-calorie bowl of poutine; it all tastes pretty much the same. Bacon and cheese overload isnt fair to your ingredients or your waistline and its a downright diss to the full-flavored majesty of great bacon and superb cheese. You wont find any of those overkill recipes in this book.

Part of the current bacon craze is due, no doubt, to a social phenomenon that you might call Good Nutrition Fatigue. There are so many experts giving us so many warnings about whats wrong with our diet that it makes you want to say Get off my back and curl up with a plate of Texas Wieners, followed by a pint of OREO chip ice cream, and a quart of Jim Beam.

Bacon obsession has become a way to proclaim our independence from the food police who would have us eat a diet mostly made with boiled lentils and mashed yeast. No doubt this explains the availability of such products as bacon-scented air fresheners, bacon jelly beans, bacon strip adhesive bandages; or how about the puzzlingly named Tactical Bacon. Its a weapons grade can of bacon designed for video game addicts. Its online sales testimonial offers this bit of strangeness: The zombies have fought long and hard, but the tide is seeming to finally turn.... we have been surviving on bacon. That is why we are strong; that is why well win.

Kind of wacko? Yes. But what such products reveal is that we have a real pro-bacon movement happening in this country. Were all for it. But we are also for respecting bacon as a delicious invention that can elevate instead of dominate other foods. Rather than treating bacon as an ingredient of last resort to rescue an uninteresting recipe or run-of-the-mill ingredients, this book puts bacon in a place of honor as a true gastronomic star. As we found in the course of writing this book, bacon goes with just about everything. More than that, everything is better with bacon.

Buy the Best Bacon: It Makes a Difference

Why pay a little more for good bacon? we are often asked. Doesnt all bacon taste pretty much the same?

Yes and no. Like a bottle of regular table wine versus a prized vintage, bacon produced with the best ingredients will taste better. While its true that bacon made with cheap ingredients from unremarkable pork will probably taste okayhey, salt, sugar, meat, and fat could make a pair of sneakers fairly palatablewe have found that when you can get it, bacon from artisanal producers, and especially bacon from premium free-range pork, is the way to go. Its not just snob appeal. Your taste buds wont lie to you.

More and more supermarkets now carry really fine bacon. Some brands, like Niman Ranch or Bentons, are available in many parts of the country. There are now thousands of farmers markets where you will often find local farmers who raise their own pigs and cure their own bacon. Their production wont be huge, and they are probably not known by more than the patrons of one or two markets, but how much do you need to make you happy? Latching on to one farmer who makes a really good product is like having your own private producer. Usually a lot more care goes into these small-production bacons than you can ever find with a big name brand.

We tried bacon from a number of quality producers when testing the recipes for this book and we recommend the ones youll find on without reservation. Wed be the first to admit, however, that if we really wanted to make something with bacon and all that was available was the nondescript supermarket stuff, wed go ahead and cook with it. Even second-tier bacon has big flavor and crispability. Still, all things being equal, when we can, we go for the good stuff.