In Defense of the Bacon-in-the-Chocolate Trend

I’m seeing a backlash these days against the bacon-in-the-chocolate trend, but I think maybe it’s more of a backlash against food fads in general. Most fads are annoying and entirely disposable. They barely make a blip on the radar screen of Time. But trends that are worth their salt stand the test of time and transcend their trend status. That’s how classics are born.

Will bacon-in-the-chocolate stick around to become a classic? Who knows? Quiche is so 70s, pasta salad so 80s, stacked anything so 90s and bacon-in-the-chocolate so aught-years. But we still eat quiche and pasta salad. They're not such relics that we'll never eat them again, not that I'd call either of them classics.

But consider that anyone who has ever eaten pork in mole sauce in a Oaxacan restaurant has already discovered that pork and chocolate are natural friends. Like chicken—but with more flavor and better texture—pork truly shines in sweet applications, which is why you find it nestled under a layer of pineapple slices in Hawaii, topped with sweet and sour sauce in China and slathered with sweet or perhaps sweet-salty-hot-sour sauces most everywhere else.

But don’t eat bacon and chocolate together because it's The In Thing. Eat it because you like it. And if you don’t like it, find something you do like, and eat that instead. Maybe you'll start a trend.

I'll continue eating bacon with chocolate and pork with mole. And I'll carry on with my experiments to see what other concoctions I can devise to delight my taste buds. If the trends catch up with me, so be it.

Bacon Walnut Maple Fudge

This is not fudge in its strictest sense, but a liberation from the candy thermometer, one that yields tiny cubes of heaven in just a few easy steps.

First, a word about bacon: A good smoked bacon is what you want to use. Applewood smoked works well and is often the only smoky bacon you can find outside the South. (Watch out for "smoke-flavored bacon." That stuff is nasty.) Most regular grocery store bacon is unworthy of the poor hogs who gave their lives for its production. Use the best tasting bacon you can find for the best tasting fudge you can produce. If you don't live in the South, consider investing in a membership in one of the bacon of the month clubs.

16 oz. semi-sweet chocolate (or bittersweet or some combination of different chocolates—whatever makes you happy)
14 oz. sweetened, condensed milk (do not use fat-free—the consistency will be off)
2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
1 Tbsp. maple extract or maple flavoring (maple syrup won’t work)
1 c. walnuts, lightly toasted & coarsely chopped
6 slices of smoked bacon, cut into ¼-inch lardons, cooked well, drained & cooled
coarse sea salt, to taste

Lightly coat an 8- or 9-inch square pan or baking dish with non-stick spray and line with baking parchment or waxed paper.

Heat milk and chocolate in bain marie (or double boiler) over medium heat and stir to blend. Add extracts and stir to completely incorporate. Then stir in nuts and bacon.

Pour mixture into prepared pan and smooth to even thickness with a spatula. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt.

Let cool for a few minutes and then refrigerate, uncovered, until fudge is set, about 2 hours. Cut into desired size pieces. Store any remaining fudge uncovered, as sealing it causes moisture to melt the salt.

Enjoy a piece with a big ol' glass of milk. Or if you're just too sophisticated for that, ruby port will do nicely.

Week #24 Oaxacan (Mexican)

Lately this "52 Cuisines" project has been heavily weighted toward Asian food--obviously the blog itself has been!--so it's time to visit a different hemisphere for awhile and explore another of Mexico's many cuisines.

The cuisine of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, contains a dizzying blend of indigenous ingredients, like chocolate and peppers, with the Arabic contribution of nuts, raisins and spices brought to the region by Spanish explorers. (Our hemisphere repaid the favor by sending tomatoes, potatoes, corn, chocolate and peppers to the rest of the world. Not a bad trade, I'd say.)

Antequera De Oaxaca is a modest little restaurant on Melrose between Koreatown and Paramount Pictures. This strip of Melrose has tons of great finds, and Antequera is the place to go for Oaxacan food cooked by Oaxacans for Oaxacans. I met Pat for lunch there, and we sampled an array of eats, with an eye toward carrying home plenty of leftovers.

Black beans are popular in Oaxaca, sometimes simply smashed and smeared over a tortilla.

 Pat ordered what looked a bit like a Mexican pizza, a giant, super-thin homemade tortilla topped with the smashed black beans, Oaxacan queso, tomato slices, cabbage and avocado. This is about as light and as vegetarian as a Oaxacan meal can get, unless you opt for a very basic salad. A smart choice if you don't want to fall into a postprandial coma at siesta time. Or if you're constantly training for marathons, like Pat is!

  

a quartet of memelas

In the memelas the black beans were spread on each of these four masa cakes, then topped with Oaxacan cheese and chorizo (12:00), zingy, flavorful chicken (2:00), pork (5:00) and beef (9:00) and a slice of avocado. A pleasantly warm salsa on the table provided a little extra kick. I appreciated our server bringing the  memelas with this assortment of meat so we could sample them all. The chorizo was surprisingly mild, while the chicken was the one that carried a surprising punch.

The masa cake is a flat bread roughly the size and shape of a hamburger bun bottom, and while it didn't feel at all greasy, toasted on a grill, I'm sure it was loaded with lard, so lush was its texture. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, with a nice bit of char from the grill. Okay, so that's not umami--I wonder what it is in the carbony flavor that so appeals? I think I could have eaten an entire basket of masa cake and been quite happy.

 Stew made from goat ribs--all those little bones give the broth extra richness.

I just had to give the goat stew a try. It was tasty and only a wee bit gamy. A generous squeeze lime helped tame it. It came with a roll of fresh, hot tortillas, so I could fish out hunks of goat meat and make my own tacos with fresh onions, jalapenos and cilantro.

  

Horchata: a rice drink that is lightly sweet and refreshing. This one had pecan pieces and chunks of cantaloupe in it.

While Oaxaca has a diverse cuisine to match its diverse landscape, it's probably best known as "the land of the seven moles" (although there are many more) and we're not talking little animals. This region's cooks are the ingenious souls who took chocolate and made something savory with it.

  

These don't look like much, but they're the secret to great mole. At 2:00 is poblano, a red chile mole base; at 6:00ish is pepita, or pumpkin seed, and at 9:00 is almond.

A typical mole recipe calls for about two dozen ingredients, but it can contain even more. Making it is understandably a labor intensive endeavor, so you have to set aside a day to do nothing but roast and toast, chop and pulverize and mix, so you can make enough mole to last a really long time. It's fun to do in a group, and the effort is worth it. If you dissolve a couple of generous spoonfuls of one of these pastes in a little broth, you'll quickly create the most wonderfully flavored, richest sauces you can imagine. Pour it over the meat of your choice, or drizzle it over an enchilada or into a taco. It's bliss. Forget the bottled stuff--try making your own mole sometime. Be sure and invite over some eager friends to help share in the chores and the rewards.


I have a trio of moles on hand (they're in the photo above) that I picked up at L.A.'s Central Market, a downtown treasure trove not only of fresh produce but of authentic Mexican eats. The green mole is made of pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and is mildly spicy. The almond mole is redolent of toasted almonds and packs some heat, while the poblano mole is chocolaty-good and contains the heat and smokiness of an array of dried chiles.


There's a more obscure mole called manchamanteles, a.k.a. the "tablecloth stainer," because it's made with lots of charred tomatoes. I've not found this one yet, but I'm eager to try it, with lots of napkins!

Chicken mole tamale: a rich, happy-making treat wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf. This time the mole is on the inside rather than the outside. A squeeze of lime helps balance the richness.

We're not even scratching the surface here on Oaxacan cuisine. There are chapulines--crickets--which were not on the menu the day we went to Antequera De Oaxaca. I had them a couple of years ago on a jaunt to Mexico, so if you want to read about it, check out my blog entry on chapulines and huitlacoche. 


My colleague and friend Nancy Zaslavsky is passionate about Mexico and its food. If you want to learn more about the cuisine of Oaxaca--and if you want to visit and learn to cook the local specialties--check out her culinary tours of Mexico. She's been carrying guests to Mexico for years now and teaching them to cook authentic Mexican food on its home turf.

Everything’s better with chocolate . . . and heat!

It isn’t often that you sit down to a meal with a variety of Tabasco sauces on your table, but that was my good fortune during the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals in New Orleans last month. The Tabasco company was sponsoring the meal, so it was their prerogative to scatter the room with samples of all their products. Each table had an assortment of Tabasco sauces, the original, the jalapeno green, the garlic, the habanero, the smoky chipotle and the sweet & spicy.

Maybe it’s not your first inclination, but I grabbed up the habanero and splashed some onto my chocolate pecan pie. It really picked up the flavors of the pie, in addition to adding the element of heat. It was a great combo.

Similarly, during last summer’s Fourth of July party, I nosed my way to the chocolate fountain past the kids with their marshmallows, strawberries and banana chunks, flowed some of the chocolate sauce into a dish for myself and dunked my barbecued pork ribs into it. It was love at first nibble, a smooth and pleasant blend of pork and fat and spiciness and chocolate and sweetness.

Both are examples of how you can tweak the basic idea of Mexico’s mole to create something new and wonderful. Dreaming up great flavor combinations is limited only by our imagination and perhaps by our degree of adventurousness. It doesn’t hurt to try one bite. And when you find a particular combination of flavors you like as in, say, mole, use that as your cue to try similar combinations. Spicy, chocolaty mole over pork in a Mexican restaurant encouraged me to try chocolate sauce on my spicy pork ribs. See how easy that is?

Now pass the hot sauce!