Results tagged “bacon”

                

Baconfest Chicago proper won't be for another six months, but if Saturday's VIP pro cookoff is any indication organizers Seth Zurer, Michael Griggs and Andre Pluess might want to have some ambulances at the ready. Or at least some Lipitor. We won't get into another debate about how played out the bacon meme is; haters will hate, lovers will love. But there was a sense of fun among the crowd Saturday. As vocal as the pro- and anti-bacon folks can be, the overall vibe was lifted from Alfred E. Neumann: "What? Me Worry?" Few took themselves seriously at the cookoff and levity reigned. So did excess.

Time Out Chicago's David Tamarkin tries to write a humorous piece about our obsession with bacon — he thinks it's much ado about nothing — but comes across sounding like Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino." Thanks, David. You just gave us an excuse to run another shot of our recent pantry meat experiment. [TOC]

A few weeks back at Chicago Gourmet, we heard Mindy Segal, the chef/owner of Hot Chocolate, expounding the virtues of cookies to the audience. She particularly plugged her bacon chocolate-chip cookies. It's possible that an audible gasp escaped our mouth at this revelation, and we determined to try them at once!

Alright, we'll admit it - a lot of the time, we think collard greens are boiled to death. We know that some collard purists are going to get angry with us, arguing that the traditional way of cooking greens is the only way and that "pot licker" is the nectar of the gods. That's fine for them - we like our greens with a bit more bite.

  

Try to resist a good dessert. You can't. Last weekend we had two very good ones at two separate locations a block apart.

Isn't that pretty? After two weeks of curing, dry aging, smoking and slicing we now have 8 pounds of pancetta and bacon. The pancetta (pictured above), was ready for slicing and cooking. Here's something we discovered: For the bacon we had considered doing an applewood smoking of the bacon. Instead we went with hickory. For that, we set up our bullet smoker (a Weber Smoky mountain is ideal, we have a Brinkman bullet smoker) to reach a temperature of 120 degrees and smoked the bacon for 2 hours. You don't want the bacon to cook during the process, so try to keep the temperature constant.

Although we have raised a significant amount of pledged monetary and in-kind sponsorship support, we have not been able to meet the financial goals that would make it possible to produce the event on the original time-line.

   

A week has passed since we threw 8 pounds of pork belly into freezer bags full of salt, sugar, cracked black pepper, fresh oregano and thyme and some pink salt, for some. Yesterday it was time to hang that pork belly and let it dry age.

     

When you walk into the Spice House in Old Town with 10 pounds of pork belly strapped to your back, you're telegraphing to the employees what you need. What we were looking for was four ounces of sodium nitrate, aka "pink salt."

What a difference a week makes. And a lot of salt, pepper, sugar and thyme. The pork jowl has been cured (compare the shot above to how it looked before curing last week) and looks like it's well on its way to becoming rich, savory bacon.

   

Our love of bacon has come to its logical endgame: we're making our own.

First came lolcats. Then Stuff White People Like. Now, the latest iteration of blogosphere-born book deals is…bacon.

Bacon has been big amongst our own circle since, oh, 1972, so we were a bit mystified that the MSM suddenly thought it was some sort of hipster fad. What do tyou think, is bacon really done for?

• In the wake of an article calling hamburgers "the Hummers of food," Helen Rosner lists local restaurants that source the beef for their burgers from local farms. Why Paul Kahan isn't getting his lamb from Mint Creek Farm, only he knows. [MP Chicago]
• Speaking of localvore issues, check out the expanded version of the Local Beet.[The Local Beet]
• The fine folks at Drive-Thru have been very busy this week. Chris Brunn and Cinnamon Cooper offer a couple vegan-friendly recipes; Cooper infuses vodka with her namesake spice; and Robyn Nisi made the mistake of replacing real lemon juice for her lemon ricotta cookies with ReaLemon. [Drive-Thru]

This winter, we’ve been on a real root vegetable kick. We’ve re-discovered beets, come to love turnips and remembered that we don’t really like parsnips as much as we think we should. In our kitchen, root veggies have been steamed, roasted, pickled and turned into pasta. But, aside from last week’s Onion Soup, they haven’t really been turned into soup.

Today's Diversion is educational and mouth-watering in nature. Feast your eyes on the creation of one of our favorite things!

When we tried the country fried bacon at Risqué Café a few months back we knew that we were taking a few months off our life expectancy. Then we noticed that Evanston's popular hot dog joint Wiener and Still Champion (also made their own country fried bacon and thought to ourselves, "What the hell?"

  

In my dreams, a Baconmobile is a little more ambitious than this. But it's a start.

I present to you this photo of chocolate-dipped bacon. And if you think that's awesome, stay tuned for our live-blogging Dick Durbin and Barack Obama's speeches later this evening.

Police officers will be going undercover as pedestrians to bust drivers who don't yield in crosswalks. [Trib]

Chicagoist alum Scott Smith once described Morgan's on Maxwell as "a great destination for anyone who wants to take a date to dinner without missing SportsCenter." The burgers and other sandwiches here, however, have some merit. Although every time we step into Morgan's we can't help but think about all the dugouts, tube socks and "Grown Folks Music" we used to buy in the same location when Maxwell Street was, well, Maxwell Street.

We don't know about you, but we could sure use some awesome today. Being back at work can suck it so hard.

Chicagoist's brother-in-law is a man of many excesses, most of which revolve around pork products. And while we aren't quite the connoisseur that he is, it's no big secret that Chicagoist loves bacon. So what's so great about Milk & Honey's BLT? How about this — everything. The bread is perfectly toasted Italian bread that gives a satisfying crunch while maintaining its inner softness. The bacon is neither a greasy slab of fat nor...