Brighter Flames Arrayed

The image you see here is a glass jar filled with the leftover bacon grease from my cast iron skillet for about three weeks. The jar was placed in my freezer between uses. Now that it’s filled you can see that there are different strata of grease in the bottle. Since each iteration of bacon grease gets settled and frozen before another is poured into it there are discrete layers corresponding to different cooking times (eras?) and kinds of bacon used.

The darker stuff in the middle probably came from hickory smoked thick cut bacon. The large section below it was probably from a pound of two of apple-smoked bacon that was on sale at my local co-op. I can’t really identify the rest but I’m pretty sure that uncured bacon grease looks different; the darker, thin strands are basically sediment from the white fat above it.

There you have it: the bacon analogue of geology. Now I am going to go do something a whole lot more productive…

Wing :: Apr.07.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Last Thursday I discovered another link between Southern American and Southern Chinese cuisine: chicken fried pork, which is also called tonkatsu given the right sauces poured on top. This is exceptionally significant because Southern Chinese style tonkatsu (served on rice and without the standard Japanese tonkatsu sauce) is one of my favorite things in the entire world and discovering my favorite piece of Oriental food in a diner in rural Vermont is yet another proof that pork is awesome and transcends global political (but not religional) boundaries.

Not the pork I had because I was too busy eating to photograph my plate of awesome.

The basic idea of chicken fried steak/pork is that you take a steak or pork chop, bread it and fry it like fried chicken. That’s… tonkatsu. Except the local diner (and Southern tradition) puts homemade gravy on it instead of the sweet Japanese tonkatsu sauce. That actually makes it taste so much better. I am used to having tonkatsu on rice with no sauce but I actually prefer homemade gravy much more. Sadly there were no collards—the Southern obsession with dark leafy greens with salt in wet brothy goodness is something else I agree with—with my order like in the picture.

In order to understand why I love fried pork so much I’d have to go back to a story about my father like presidential memoirs do. When he was in Hong Kong he was a mechanic and repaired large looms in textile mills. He had his own machine shop in an industrial building that is now basically almost all offices and art studios since light industry has moved out of the city much like they moved out of New England mills decades ago. I spent a lot of time next to the machine lathes and not next to the arc welders doing basic office work and small prep work. Protip: If your kid has OCD having him organize your business receipts while preparing for a tax audit may not be a bad idea.

Now, pretty much every single industrial building has a cafe formed by knocking down several walls between adjoining shops/spaces and hooking up some basic kitchen equipment where heavy machinery would normally be. The one in my father’s building happened to be next to the rooftop of the garage/loading docks and so it was a swanky outdoor cafe with blue tarps haphazardly propped up with two by fours over folding tables and folding chairs set up on the rooftop. Places like these served large platefuls of meats and carbs for less than a US dollar a pop; located in a tower full of machine shops and small factories means that it gets mobbed everyday during lunch time.

Being six, there really weren’t many things I could eat there. Everything on the menu either contained lots of cheap vegetables stewed in (note: being six I have not developed a taste of vegetables yet) or had a sour or bitter sauce over it. Also, most things on the menu were meant for men who do heavy labor all day and the portions were intense. The solution: tonkatsu over rice with my father taking half the rice so the calorie count was once again something that mere mortals can consume.

As you can imagine a cafe in an industrial building with minimal kitchen equipment (basically a pile of natural gas tanks, some huge woks, several industrial sized gas-operated rice cookers, a pot of hot oil and no fear of exceedingly intense flames because everything is concrete and the chefs are as tough as the guys who carry 100kg parts up and down the stairs) is amazing at deep frying things. Places like this are also great at stir frying things or basically doing anything where being delicate is not necessary and intensity counts for a whole lot. Furthermore I’m pretty sure that they didn’t really follow all that many health codes so they could have put lead shavings into the food to make them more additive; who knows? This is where I developed a taste for breaded and deep fried pork.

And now thanks to rural Southern American traditions I can have fried pork with homemade mystery gravy (the best kind) poured all over it. Om nom nom.

Wing :: Jan.24.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Tim Eriksen’s Facebook profile alerted me to The Bluegrass Intelligencer, which is kind of like The Onion for bluegrass and folk music.

The headline stories include Aoife O’Donovan being burned as a witch because her voice is just a little too enchanting, all fiddle tunes with stupid names getting their names removed, Tim Eriksen bracing for death (with song) while stuck in a tree, and some Kentucky kid inventing the five finger banjo style.

I think I’ll just stop making jokes about bluegrass because nothing can be as funny as this site. Ever.

Wing :: Apr.08.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Last week, for my birthday, my friend John (who first posed to me the question of whether bacon could be used as yarn) and I decided to make a knitted bacon BLT. Or would that be a knitted BLT? Knitted bacon LT? KBLT? (KB)LT? Oh whatever. Let’s not argue syntax and move on to the taxing sin of, once again, knitting bacon.

The toothpicks are holding the bacon together.

Now, John’s a much better knitter than I am, so this time the knitted bacon is much improved. Also, since I can take pictures and drink beer while he knits, this entire process is much more streamlined and joyous than the last time around… The first improvement is easy to see: he used toothpicks to join the bacon together so he did not have the problems I got with tucking bacon into other bacon. The bacon consistency this time around is much better.

Notice the cabling that's going on here.

The second thing is that it now has cabling. I am not sure whether that makes it tastier, but I am sure that it multiplies the awesomeness by a rather large positive factor—I feared that the universe would end due to sheer awesomeness if he cabled bacon, and just because he knows I fear it, John had to cable the goddamn bacon.

This is after an hour in the oven.

Because there is now 3/4 lbs. of bacon in this patch, it took forever to cook. According to the timestamps on the photos, it took about 70 minutes in the oven for the bacon to look like the picture above. And the sad thing is that it wasn’t done yet. In fact, it was so raw in the middle that our friend Matt—who usually goes oh ho ho I lived in France for years and ate raw meat as part of my fancy French cuisine—considered it not done. It took a total of over 90 minutes at 400 degrees for the bacon to fully cook to not-hospitalizing-us standards.

The veggies make the bacon better! Truth!

Combined with delicious organic mayo, delicious strong mustard, delicious fancy sliced bread, delicious tomato and delicious lettuce, the knitted bacon BLT was born.

Knitted bacon is knitted.

You can see from the picture that there is a lot of bacon in this thing. A normal BLT at a diner contains maybe two strips of bacon. This baconlicious monster contains 3/4 pounds of bacon. According to the sample of bacon I have in my fridge that is about 11 slices of bacon. And since the knitting, as I scientifically discovered last time around, seals the fat in this is 11 slices of extra-greasy bacon. Let me try this again, spelling out the number and using the magic of HTML for emphasis: this is a BLT with eleven frackin’ strips of extra-fat bacon.

Sure, you can pile 11 strips of bacon on a BLT normally, like a normal person would, perhaps. But they will fall off. This is one specifically crafted BLT-sized patch of dense baconknit. It stays on the bread and it provides a consistent, even distribution of bacon. I dare say that this was the best BLT we’ve ever had. It may have taken exactly 118 minutes to make but it was worth every single minute; especially since, you know, 90 of those minutes consisted of drinking beer and hanging out while the bacon cooks.

Wing :: Feb.28.2009 :: Posts :: 9 Comments »

This morning I created an abomination; it was a nexus of lust, greed and gluttony weaved from the purest desires of man. When I came to, I was covered in fat, grease and the slimy manna of sin. Perhaps I have doomed all of humanity by unleashing this upon the world; if the world explodes tomorrow you’ll know that it’s all my fault.

A raw mess of bacon. Nom.

It all started when my friend John asked me, possibly inspired by my tale of the bacon explosion, whether bacon could be knitted instead of simply weaved. Since I was on vacation and was bored because I was waiting for my stew to cook and just got a pound of bacon last night, I knew I had to do this. For science!

The hardest part, he thought, would be taking strips of bacon and combining them into one long “yarn”. So he enlisted the help of The Basil Queen, who recommended some fancy cooking technique that involves fine needlework or something. Fie! My KNITCRAFT skill may be poor, but I do not need fancy cooking techniques to knit bacon. I simply used my LEVEL 40 YARNTECH: THE JOINING and weaved more bacon in at the end of each strip. Twenty minutes later, I had, according to Google, the Interweb’s first patch of knitted bacon.

A proper establishing shot for scale.

Knitting bacon is, in case you haven’t guessed, hard. The fact that the bacon is exceedingly greasy makes it somewhat easy: they slide on to the chopsticks really well. (I used a pair of chopsticks for each knitting “needle”. I actually have been knitting with chopsticks a lot years ago. That was really the only natural part of this exercise.) The problem is that it’s hard to make out where the bacon strips end and where to stick your “needle” in.

As you can see, I knitted only three and a half rows and then gave up. The mess of bacon was just so… messy… that I couldn’t figure out where to put the needles in anymore. Also some of those strands were so thin that I was afraid the whole thing would fall apart if I pulled too hard. Perhaps next time I’ll twist/spin the bacon into bacon-yarn first.

This is what happens when a bacon knit meets gravity.

The bacon knit is an unholy mesh of fat and meat, a writhing mass of grease engaged in an eternal orgy of gluttony. (If you’ve been reading Jack (NSFW link!), the bacon knit is basically like an edible Valley of Lust (NSFW link!).) It can only really be appreciated if it’s lifted up in the air though… Dripping, oozing, oh so delicious.

Time to shove this sucker in the oven! I followed the recipe for a mundane bacon weave: bacon in cast iron skillet, skillet in oven, 400 degrees, 15 to 20 minutes.

After twenty minutes of baking at 400 degrees.

It turned out that I needed to leave it in there for half an hour. Since the bacon was knitted/knotted it took longer to cook through. Also, because I left the “needles” in there (you’ll notice that I switched plastic chopsticks with bamboo ones before putting it in the oven) most of the knit was not touching the hot skillet surface.

Draining the fat so it isn't too deadly...

The biggest problem (and also the best part) about a bacon knit is that the knotting and knitting, along with the multiple layers of bacon where strips are joined, seals the fat in. Half a pound of bacon should not produce this little grease when cooked. (You can see the grease level in the previous two pictures.) In fact, cooking three strips of bacon last night I ended up with twice as much grease. This is because all that artery-destroying oil is sealed inside each stitch.

This means that the bacon knit is deadly, but also delicious.

You can kind of see the stitching here.

You can get the same fatty, chewy effect of bacon by beer battering strips of bacon and then deep frying them. However, knitted bacon gives the satisfaction of being only bacon and having that “sheet” integrity that makes it possible for you to eat the thing off a “knitting needle”. I found that the most satisfying way of eating one of these things is to just dangle it off a needle and bite it from the bottom. Om nom nom. Maybe I’ll call this a Bacon Knit Ka-Bob? Bacon Flag?

Ultimately, bacon knit is not as useful as bacon weave, harder to make and way messier. However it is more delicious (more bacon per square inch?) and, well, it’s bacon knitted into a patch. Seriously. I’d imagine that this would be epic if you put it in a burger…

I feel like I did science today. Awesome science.

Update: The bacon knit patch has been improved (with cabling) and applied to the most delicious BLT ever made! Check it out!

Wing :: Feb.10.2009 :: Posts :: 14 Comments »