Clearly, this bacon reputation thing is getting out of control. I swear, I’m not obsessed by it, but people keep sending me these cool links… The lastest is from Richie (his blog is well worth adding to your RSS incidentally) who sent me this link to bacon cups:
These are actually a good deal less ridiculous than my other recent food-related entries. For a start, BLT is a classic flavour combination; secondly the portions are human sized; and thirdly, apart from a few rashers of streaky bacon, it’s not unhealthy at all. Lettuce and cherry tomatos? Yeah, pile that stuff on.
Nevertheless, that is some damned cunning bacon engineering, Megan, and for that I salute you. Bravo!
I think I’m getting a reputation, because people are sending me stupid foodstuffs now. Still, it’s a blog post that practically writes itself, and I am nothing if not lazy, so here goes.
Chris brought another mention of chicken fried bacon (here called country fried bacon, but it looks the same to me) to my attention. The article itself is just more of the same lunacy I’ve already covered, but the comments are recommended:
Please don’t turn bacon into a meme. By their very nature, memes are fads and come and go, blow up and become passe. I swear to God, if any fucking hipster looks at me sideways for enjoying bacon in 2010, I will lose it.
However, Rupert upped the ante with this act of lunacy from holytaco.net (which, it seems, was all over Digg for days before I saw it; I guess I’m just not hip enough). Please do click through to the original article, because whoever ate this monstrosity deserves the hits; but these (blatantly stolen) pictures should encourage you:
You see, in bacon weaving — as with so much in life — the line between madness and genius is “fill with cheese”.
This time, unlike the Luther burger and chicken fried bacon, the stupidity is not in the concept. No, this is just a cheeseburger. Nothing daft there, right? Wrong! The stupidity comes with the scale of this cheeseburger:
ABCNews sent a reporter to try and eat this monster. He even took a competitive eating champion with him to help him out, who — unlike that tiny Japanese guy who can eat a squillion hotdogs a second — looks exactly how’d expect an American competitive eating champion to look. Right down to the meat sweats:
SPOILER WARNING: they failed. Some bafflingly huge numbers:
50 pounds of beef — so that’s 800oz, or 3.6 stone, or 22.6kg.
a whole catering size packet of American cheese
an entire head of lettuce
several whole beef tomatoes
a custom-baked bun big enough to hollow out and live inside
it costs $160 — but if you, and up to four of your mates, can eat the whole thing in less than three hours you get it free and a $1000 prize on top. That’s still the equivalent of 40 standard quarter-pounder burgers each though. No-one has ever done it.
Still, if you’re not hungry for burgers, the same ABC article brings news of the biggest pancakes I’ve ever seen, several restaurants that do 72oz steaks, and some place that that does a 21-scoop ice cream special sundae where ” our scoops are really big, they’re like baseball sized”. Again, in all cases, if you can finish the food, you dine for free.
And yet America has an obesity problem! What an odd coincidence that is.
Continuing the fine traditions of stupid American Cooking embodied by the Luther Burger, m’learned friend Range Rover Wrecker Matt brings to my attention the concept of “chicken fried bacon”. “Chicken fried” seems to be some sort of stupid US slang for the process of deep frying something coated in breadcrumbs; its usually done to tenderised steak, so you end up with something similar to a Wiener Schnitzel.
However, as visionary Glen Kusak, winner of the State Fair of Texas “best taste” award notes:
Everything in Texas is chicken fried and bacon makes everything better so we thought we’d put the two together
So what does it look like? Watch this. Pay close attention to the onion rings at around 1:05 into the video, and the chicken fried bacon itself appears at 1:30.
Yes, that’s right: they are battering and deep frying bacon now. And they have onion rings big enough to serve as a makeshift belt, presumably because your heaving gut just broke the one you wore on your way to the diner. That’s doubly convenient! I have to try this. Quick! To the intercontinental conveyancing device! No need to pack — we’re not going to fit in these clothes when we’re done anyway!
When the line between genius and madness is as thin as the line between pizza and cheese on toast!
(Two slices of home-baked bread, tomato pizza base from a jar, salami, and cheese. It tasted great, but then, everything that fatty tastes great after a few…)
A Luther Burger is a hamburger, specifically a bacon cheeseburger, which employs a grilled glazed doughnut in place of the bun.
I’ll let you think about that for a bit. A doughnut instead of bread. A… glazed… doughnut. This may be the greatest culinary saturated fat delivery mechanism since the Waffle of Death. For your comparative convenience, I present the Waffle of Death:
This was the last potato waffle that wouldn’t fit in the oven when Toby and I were making a refreshing dinner of sausages and waffles. So being a pragmatic chap he fried it alongside the sausages. By the time it was cooked, all the little holes had entire closed up from the absorbed fat. It tasted great, but my stomach hurt after one bite, so that was all I ate. I thought until now this was the pinnacle of culinary achievement but… burgers and doughnuts, together at last?
You see, in bacon weaving — as with so much in life — the line between madness and genius is “fill with cheese”.
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