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.

Home From the Greenbrier: A Retrospective

 How do I sum up the Greenbrier experience?

I've perused the writings of my fellow attendees of the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at the Greenbrier during the past few days. Their reflections are comprehensive, coherent and helpful, while I still don't know what to say. I'm not inclined to merely parrot their observations or roll out a series of photos of everything we ate, since the focus was on food writing and publishing, not simply on food. In fact, I was leery of paying too much attention to the food itself for fear I'd miss out on the meat (so to speak) of the Symposium.

Instead of blathering on about it, I'll let three photos speak for me:

 The attention to detail was striking, all the way down to the chocolates on our tables in our meeting room. Notice how each one is arranged just so, with the wrappers placed facing outward? No detail was too small to escape their attention. On my bed were four pillows: a soft one for stomach sleepers, a medium one for back sleepers, a firm one for side sleepers and a feather pillow for me! I built a fort out of them, burrowed in each night and slept the sleep of the happily overwhelmed.

Speaking of happily overwhelmed, breakfast on the final morning featured this knock-your-socks-off presentation of pork, a chunky and succulent homemade sausage wrapped in a perfect latticework of bacon. The ungenerous, antisocial part of me wanted to snatch it away and sit in the corner alone and eat it all.

I didn't do that, you'll be happy to know. The company was too good and the conversation too rich, to do such a thing. I have more friends and professional associates than I had before I went, people whose talent, work and opinions I value. People I can turn to for advice, and for whom I'll gladly provide the same. We writers do not exist in a bubble. We need each other's insights, generously given. At the Symposium, I hit the mother lode.

self portrait

I love this painting of a drooling pig, hung just outside the entrance to the main dining room at the Greenbrier. It pretty much sums up the way I feel about my experience there, both personally and professionally--happy, but hungry for more.

Week #30 Filipino

Encapsulate the cuisine of the Philippines in one brief blog entry? Fat chance! A nation spread over more than 7,000 islands and comprising the influences of countries both near and far--both friendly and conquering--is not so easily characterized. One look at the menu of Manila Sunset on Vermont Avenue at Santa Monica Boulevard reveals some of the myriad influences on the Filipino palate: lumpia and chopsuey are Chinese; adobo, lechón and menudo are Spanish; and bistek Tagalog reveals a blend of Spanish and local cooking styles. The native cuisine itself offers up plenty of pork specialties, including dinguan, a stew made of the organs and blood of the pig.

Himself and I wandered in on a Saturday, when the place was hopping with people who all seemed to know each other. As more and more came in, there were hellos and hugs and the pushing together of tables. We were the only Anglos there, so we felt we'd hit upon a good place to have a Filipino lunch and enjoy the swirl of the community around us.

I'd never heard of milkfish until this meal, but apparently it's quite popular in the Philippines--and throughout Southeast Asia--and on account of its remarkably bony structure, having it served de-boned is a huge deal. What arrived at the table was half a milkfish, grilled and served in its skin which had the consistency of soft leather.

Half of a Milkfish

...the left half!

 

tasty, tasty milkiness...

Milkfish is milky appearance but not texture. Still, it was moist in spite of looking rather dry, as much white fish does. While it had a delicate flavor, it stood up well to the grilling, as the char enhanced rather than masked its flavor. In fact, it's some of the best fish I've ever had.

Pork is popular on Filipino menus and always a winner with me, so I got the pork skewers.

mmm, pig-on-a-stick...

Like the fish, the pork bore a respectable amount of char. It was caramelized by the influence of fire and a lightly sweet marinade. We made our way through the meal with bite of pork--bite of fish--bite of pork--bite of fish...

 The egg drop soup was good, but nothing surprising. It was made with rice noodles and slivers of mushroom. Not to disparage it at all, but I'm always hesitant to fill up on hot soup when I can smell an amazing entrée heading my way!

Our dessert, bibingkang galapong, is a Filipino favorite that came to the islands by way of Goa on the west coast India. It's a somewhat custardy sort of cake made from rice flour, and it was actually jiggly! Baked and served in a banana leaf, it was topped with a fresh cheese that made the dessert interestingly salty and sweet. The freshly grated coconut on the side helped lighten its richness.

To drink we had (on the left) sago and gulaman, a sweet, syrupy palm-based beverage with soba balls and cubes of an agar agar-based gelatin, and (on the right) cantaloupe juice that was loaded with shreds of fresh melon. It was pretty sweet, so I'm betting there was some simple syrup in there, too. I get a kick out of both eating and drinking my beverage, so these were hits with me.

I'll certainly be back for more milkfish. I even want to try the dinguan (okay, so you don't have to). With a menu filled with options for both meat lovers and vegetarians, it looks like I have a lot left to explore.

Week #15 Michoacan (Mexican)

Well into the fourth month of this 52 Cuisines project, I still haven't featured any Mexican cuisines. It's time to remedy that. When you're considering a country as vast as Mexico, though, you really can't get away with a quickie generic view of its food. This country has so many regions and such a variety of land- and seascapes that the foods here are as varied as they'd be across any continent. Mexican aficionado Chef Rick Bayless divides culinary Mexico into six regions, while Mexicans themselves divide it into many, many more. So this project will send me scrambling in a lot of directions if I want to do it justice.

I've heard Michoacan, the central Pacific Coast region, referred to as the California of Mexico. Essentially, it's considered the country's breadbasket. Himself and I set out to find a Michoacan restaurant, and we discovered that it's like trying to find a California restaurant. Michoacan refers more to a style of cooking rather than to a particular list of foods indigenous to the region. What I'm finding in the search for a Michoacan restaurant is that a lot of places around LA include the words "Michoacan" and "carnitas" in their names. Apparently what they refer to is the way carnitas are cooked in Michoacan. I guess it's a little like finding Memphis-style pork ribs or New England-style clam chowder far from their place of origin.

Himself and I stopped off at a little mamá y papá establishment in North Hollywood alternately called Super Tacos Michoacan and Calimex Restaurant, depending on which signage you observe.

Well, this signage was amusing...

 Carnitas Michoacan with the fixin's

I ordered the Carnitas Michoacan, served with the sautéed onions and a really fine red salsa. They were porky and luscious (that's a more veiled way of saying "fatty"--don't you like it?!). Essentially the meat is cooked twice, once to render it done and once to crisp it up. While the region may or may not have been the originator of carnitas (there's some question about that), there seems to be little disagreement that this is where the cooking method was perfected.

tres tacos

Himself got a trio of tacos: carnitas, al pastor and lingua. These were really good tacos but pretty much what you'd find in a taqueria in Mexico City. Of course, capital cities--and other large cities--tend to be repositories of the foods of the hinterlands around them, because people tend to carry their beloved foods and preparation techniques with them when they migrate to the big city. While al pastor is said to have been devised in the DF, "al pastor" indicates that it's made in the style of the shepherd, which means, in the country, not the city. So I don't think this issue is completely resolved for me yet.

 Lingua Taco

This is some of the best lingua I've ever had, with a good, beefy flavor and a great texture--I appreciate tongue that doesn't put up a fight. As you can imagine, even if you've never eaten tongue, the texture is going to be entirely different from that of any other cut of beef. This lingua had great body--it wasn't overcooked and chewy. I enjoyed the bites I took of it without any salsa or accompaniment.

We had a fine meal at this Mexican-place-with-two-names, and we'll certainly return there, but Himself and I didn't feel we'd really gotten the Michoacan experience. So I searched for some recipes to expand our knowledge and palette. Here's what I made:

Sopa Tarasca

Sopa Tarasca: Himself pronounced it bean chili. I guess that's essentially what it is--puréed pinto beans made into a soup with onion, garlic, ancho chile and tomato. It was certainly good enough to make again, but next time, instead of sautéing with canola or vegetable oil, I'll use some bacon drippings for extra flavor and richer mouth feel. I'm sure that's how they do it in Mexico, too, or at least they use manteca. (It's not too difficult to see that I'd make one extraordinarily cranky vegetarian.)

Puerco Estilo Apatzingan: ready for the oven

Puerco Estilo Apatzingan: This is a pork roast slathered with a paste made of guajillo chiles, tomatoes, garlic, orange juice and peppercorns, then covered in orange and onion slices and given a good braise. The recipe said to top it all with a good slosh of white wine and a fresh sprig of either oregano or marjoram. Being a smarty-pants with a great herb garden, I included one of each.

Puerco Estilo Apatzingan: out of the oven & ready for the plate

Puerco Estilo Apatzingan: on the plate

The puerco was muy delicioso, not surprising, because pork is such an amazingly versatile meat. The addition of oranges, peel and all, was really nice. The braise smoothed the bitterness of the oranges' pith, so it played nicely with the pork, onions and peppers. Still, I could taste a little of the bitterness, which was surprisingly pleasant against the sweet, salt and fat in the pork. We Westerners are still working to acquire a taste for bitter, something Asian cuisines have known how to work with for ages.

We still had a boatload o' pork left over after this meal, so I've varied its preparation for each meal since. I pulled some pieces off the roast and gave them a quick recharge in a skillet with some bacon drippings, which crisped them--carnitas style--and gave them a little smoky flavor. We steamed some tortillas and piled the re-porked pork into them and topped them with a little green salsa and crumbled cotija. I think you could probably take a hunk of well-prepared meat like this and enjoy the leftovers in as many different ways as there remains meat to eat, without ever duplicating a preparation method.

Salsa de Chile Pasilla de Michoacan: I roasted pasillas, tomatillos and garlic for the green salsa, then pulverized them with some raw white onion and a little sea salt.

Salsa de Chile Pasilla de Michoacan

The result is a good multi-purpose salsa to put in or on top of any number of dishes. It jazzed up the sopa tarasca and was good on some of the interior of the pork roast that didn't receive as much flavor from its braising as the exterior did. We've also enjoyed it over rice and cheese. I like the basic idea for this salsa, but I think I'll tinker with the proportions, add more garlic and tomatillos, perhaps leave out the pasilla seeds.

I cheated and used the food processor rather than a molcajete y tejolote, a mortar and pestle made of lava stone, a standard in Mexican kitchens. I do have a couple of mortars and pestles, and I don't mind the time and energy involved in using them, but somehow it seems to be cheating as much to use one of those as to use a food processor, when I should be finding myself a proper molcajete. But then to live so close to Mexico and buy a molcajete on this side of the border also seems like cheating. I should get one there. Or at least at a real mercado somewhere around town. I don't want to just order one online or pick one up at some chain kitchen supply store.

So have we experienced Michoacan cuisine yet? I'm not sure we have. This is one of those illusive cuisines that requires further research, and probably not just here locally. I feel a road trip coming on...

Low On the Hog Is High On the Hog

Andy and I love eating at Palate, because we never know exactly what will transpire, what we'll get to sample and who we'll be privileged to spend a pleasant evening with. This past week's dinner party brought together people from an array of backgrounds with a common thread--we all love good food, good wine and good conversation. And we had plenty of all the above.

We sampled an array of sublime French cheeses and wines--essentially, whatever Todd set in front of us disappeared down our happy, grateful gullets--followed by a succession of small plates from the CUI category, that is, Cooking Under the Influence of Cheese. We had ricotta gnocchi, scallops with fennel and a rich croque monsieur with a layer of "salumi butter" inside. Each of these three dishes was nestled under a blanket of delicate summer truffles shaved so thinly they had only one side. It's a good thing we were all sitting down--we were swooning and giggling like preteens at a concert.

Just when we were beginning to feel that life couldn't get any better, what should show up on our table but a juicy, succulent, flavorful pork belly, overlaid with a golden, crisped skin. You'd think that with Los Angeles' international population and its cultural and culinary diversity, this type of meal would be fairly easy to have. But until Palate came along, pork belly was nigh impossible to find here. Accompanying it was a generous dish of succotash of beans, potatoes, zucchini and corn freshly snipped from the cob, flavored with the internal organs of the very pig who's belly we stuffed into our own. It was inspired and inspiring, both soul food and soulful food.

Of the seven of us at the table there was overlap of acquaintance, but no one person knew everyone else when we all arrived. Sharing that amazing meal was a great ice breaker. It gave us something more significant to talk about than the weather, safer to discuss than politics and more fun to ponder than the latest celebrity shenanigans. The owner stopped by our table to chat, and throughout the evening so did the executive chef, the wine merchant and the cheese guy--completing the circle of those who planned the feast, those who prepared it and those who enjoyed it. We talked until well after the food and wine were gone, lingering until we realized that it was a weeknight and we all really did have to go home.

This is a typical Palate experience: Often the unexpected lands on your table, and you never know who will drop by to chat. No matter how often we go there, we're always surprised by something--and always in a good way.

We look happy, eh? Don't worry--we shared!

Home again, home again, piggity pig

It’s good to be back home in Memphis. As I stepped from the plane onto the jetway this evening, two scents blended in my nose—jet fumes and barbecue. Right next to my gate was an Interstate Barbecue restaurant. If my family hadn't been waiting to have dinner with me, I’d have just rolled my bag right in there and gotten myself a healthy dose of pork barbecue before ever leaving the airport. Thanks for the welcome home, Neely family!

The next few days will involve spending time with family and friends, enjoying the old haunts and sighing over the lovely green Tennessee landscape that’s so very Ireland in its uncountable shades of green. And it will involve making sure to have all those foods that nourished my past—catfish, country ham, pork barbecue, cornbread, fried chicken and a variety of vegetables cooked in bacon drippings.
This field, the view from the back of our family farmhouse, has housed its share of hogs and cattle over the years, as well as the current corn crop. There we've raised both food to eat and food to sell. I've caught innumerable catfish in its pond--and we've even gigged a frog or two there for those lean, meaty legs!

Of course, when I head back to Los Angeles in 10 days, the last thing I will smell as I board the plane will probably be the same, a blend of jet fumes and barbecue. And then I’ll say, thanks for the farewell, Neely family!

p.s. I’d like to apologize to Rob Reiner for staring at him on the flight to Indianapolis today. I wasn’t staring at him because he’s Rob Reiner, but rather because I was thinking, “Gee, that man looks just like Rob Reiner.” Then later I heard someone say, “Yeah, Rob Reiner’s on this flight!” And then I knew why the man I was staring at looked so much like Rob Reiner. What an uncanny resemblance . . .

Hog Wild

At Sunday night’s Epiphany party our group convened to cap off the Christmas season with a potluck and to catch up on everyone else’s holidays. My good pal, Chuck Taggart of Gumbo Pages fame, brought his amazing Pork & Pork & Pork & Beans to share. Have this even once, and you’ll never settle for mere pork and beans again. In fact, if I ever find myself on death row, that dish will be one of the components of my final meal.

As Chuck and I compared notes on the contents of our luggage when we returned to Los Angeles after Christmas, he from New Orleans and I from Memphis, we concurred that an awful lot of pork was involved. My suitcase was stuffed with packages of country ham and bacon and a big ol' hamhock. His haul was similar, but included tasso, the secret ingredient in many fine Cajun and Creole dishes, along with Zapps potato chips and lots of booze.

In case you’re wondering, yes, you can buy pork in Los Angeles, but those mass-produced packages of Uncle Tater’s or Little Willie’s bacon will be essentially flavorless and injected with water, which is why it shrinks to nothing when you cook it and tastes like nothing when you eat it.

As we cooed over our devotion to pork, I said, “There’s only one thing better than bacon.” Chuck looked at me as if I'd lost my marbles. I paused for effect, then said, “Bacon topped with bacon.” He sighed and said, “Thank God! I was about to ask, ‘Who are you and what have you done with my friend, Carol?’”

The challenge is in reconciling a love of pork with the need to eat more healthfully, and this is where the good stuff comes in. Andy and I refuse to cast out pork like some demon bent on our destruction. Instead, we hold to the wisdom of Pete Wells, who contends in the pages of Food and Wine magazine that bacon isn’t a meat but rather a condiment.

He certainly has a point, especially as it relates to good quality bacon. The flavor is distilled smoky, salty, sweet porkiness, which we savor as we would any fine wine or food: a tiny bit at a time, over a long period of time. In fact, since Christmas we've been sharing one strip of bacon about every other morning.

Half a strip?! That sounds rather spartan, but when you eat the really good stuff—like what Chuck and I packed back to Los Angeles from home—and enjoy it over the course of a meal, it's amazing how satisfying a mere half strip of bacon can be, how the flavor lingers and how the aroma and the memory goes with you. Truth be told, I enjoy a smaller portion much more, because I don’t mindlessly wolf it down.

According to Aesop, “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.” He must have been buying his bacon at a chain grocery.

There’s a fable in there somewhere, I’m sure.

Home Grown

As I prepare to head home to rural Tennessee for Christmas, my thoughts turn to our family farm and the food traditions with which I grew up. Because as a farm girl I was well acquainted with the cycle of birth, life and death so early and so intimately, I’d say it has made me less squeamish than most when it comes to such matters, and it has taught me that it’s possible to develop respect and regard for an animal I know will end up on my plate.

This is the time of year when we’d select one fattened hog and one fattened steer to be butchered, packaged and labeled, then divvied up among the deep freezers of my grandparents, my uncle’s family and my family. This represented the bulk of the meat upon which we’d feed until the next winter.

After all the tidier pieces of meat had been put away, on a cold, cold night, we’d all convene in the smokehouse to make sausage. My mother would sew casings out of old flour sack dishrags (recycling on top of recycling!) and bring them out to the smokehouse, where my father and brother were grinding the hog trimmings with fat and seasonings. Then I, with my tiny hands, would take the squishy ground mixture, redolent of fresh pork, pepper and fennel, and stuff it into the newly-stitched casings. And my uncle would bind the ends with twine and hang the brand-new sausage with the hams to while away the months until it was needed.

I was an adult before I ever bought prepackaged meat in a grocery, or for that matter, cans of tomatoes, green beans, black-eyed peas or relish. Those things had always come out of the deep freezer and the stash in the hall cabinet. And when I finally did start bringing these items home from the grocery, they were never as satisfying as those I’d had a hand in putting up as a child.

This represents a vanishing way of life that organizations like SlowFood are working hard to reacquaint people with. Perhaps it isn’t practical for everyone to raise all their own food, but to the extent that we can, we should try. Even if it’s just a couple of pots of herbs on the kitchen windowsill, every little bit we grow for ourselves reconnects us with our initial bond with the earth from which we came.

Nectar of the porcine gods

One of the most prized possessions in my kitchen, right up there with my grandmother’s bowls, my well-seasoned iron skillets and my red, outboard motor-sized KitchenAid mixer, is my coffee can filled with bacon drippings. Both a food AND a condiment, bacon makes everything taste better—even more bacon! And the drippings perform double duty as both a cooking fat and a seasoning. What a way to multitask!

Each time I dig into that can, I reflect on the layers of hardened drippings like I would the rings of a tree. With each layer I scratch through I wonder, what was going on the day I poured in this layer? and this layer? and this layer?

I may not live in the rural South anymore, and I may be a big city girl, hobnobbing with the occasional high-profile chef and food celebrity, but I cling to my can of bacon drippings as an anchor to my cultural and culinary past—and as a way to enjoy a darned fine meal. None of that tofu-based faux bacon stuff. You’ve got to have your standards, right?