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 »

It’s been over a month since I posted, mostly because work has been extremely hectic in the last month. At some point last year my old department chair took a job in a wonderful European country and I ended up taking over his post. (One of my college advisors called it “the curse of competency, and, well, just being in one place too long.) Couple that with teaching slightly beyond normal load and having a total of four preps—we had a very welcome increase in enrollment as well as an additional elective this year, both wonderful things that necessitated more staffing—I’ve been mostly swept over by work. Not only did I not update my blog but I haven’t really read most of my RSS feeds in a month. So I’m behind on random recipes and stuff as well. I’m getting back on track, though; I’m actually caught up on grading with 60% of my classes! The other 40% I’ll deal with tomorrow.

I actually have five drafts of almost-finished blog posts that I had to stop writing in favor of sleep. At some point I’ll finish and post them. In the meantime I’m going to be listening to my college roommates’ exceptionally popular podcast (so famous people are writing homoerotic slashfic about them; esp. hilarious since I lived with them) and deal with placement issues. Also, eating toast with bacon jam. Mmm bacon jam.

Wing :: Oct.26.2009 :: Posts :: No Comments »

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 »

This morning I had a slice of bacon explosion as part of my breakfast. (It’s delicious, though it’s too salty and needed more barbeque sauce.) Turns out two of our chefs got their hands on the New York Times article on the same subject and decided to make it themselves. It wasn’t hard to acquire the material since they were already planning on feeding 200 people bacon, a large smoker for smoking large meats and they had some buckets of sawdust sitting around.

When the first person brought the NYT article to my attention (because they know I like bacon) I really didn’t want to let them down. They were so excited to share this “news” with me despite that fact that I’ve learned about it since the day the guys who made the first one posted the recipe online. The New York Times was about a week late.

How do I even begin to explain to someone who has lived in rural Vermont for years and not used to technology the concept of Web 2.0 social news? Would you believe me, fifteen years ago, that I have made a pact with 4516 other people around the world that we would send each other any remotely interesting bit of news about bacon? That we would mail each other recipes, health articles, photographs and art concerning smoked meat within minutes of discovering it ourselves? That we would sort through the thousands of articles that we forward each other and organize and evaluate them so that, if one of us is busy, we only have to read the best stories concerning bacon that day? Even crazier: I can get the newest bacon stories almost in real time! I can have a gadget play a song of triumph every time a new bacon recipe is sent to me; or I can save them up and read them at the end of the day.

And it doesn’t end with bacon. Every day millions of other people around the globe are sending me interesting articles and news tailored to my preferences. If reading about politics makes me angry I can simply ignore all the political articles with one click of a button. If I want to cheer myself up I’ll make sure I look at the most adorable photograph of a cat available on the Internet (as chosen by thousands of people who love pictures of cats) before going into world news or the day’s funniest comics. I can find out about a piece of educational technology the day its specifications are released to the public and start thinking about how to use it in the classroom years before it hits the manufacturing phrase. And none of the information I have in front of me is irrelevant because it’s been presorted by thousands of people. The only price I have to pay is that I have to accept the bias of this group of people—and I’d rather accept the bias of a mob who wants to share knowledge than that of a cable television company—and to fulfill my implicit contract of taking part in the enterprise. If I find something awesome, I will send it to everyone; if I feel strongly about a news item I will moderate it. Both very small prices to pay to access the collective informational gathering capacity of thousands of people.

And this is why I have not read a newspaper in years.

Wing :: Feb.06.2009 :: Posts :: 2 Comments »