It's All About The Bacon {Vodka}, Baby

When we visited our son, Mike, and his family in December, Mike broke out a jar of bacon/habañero pepper infused vodka he'd been steeping for a few weeks. The heat was definitely there, but Mike was a little disappointed the bacon flavor wasn't more pronounced. I've been thinking about that since we've been home. Besides steeping vodka with bacon, how could I amplify the flavor for a nice balance of heat from the peppers and the smokiness of the bacon.

As I perused the internet looking for solutions, I found that there are quite a few folks who love bacon, probably a lot more than I do, and have concocted creative ways to use bacon, besides infusing vodka.

I had no idea there was a commercially produced bacon mayonnaise. Apparently Walmart and Kroger have never heard of it either because neither carries it.

But at $6 bucks a jar, plus $5 bucks shipping, I think I'll make my own from this recipe for Bacon Mayonnaise I posted a little over a year ago.

The same company makes Bacon Flavored Popcorn.



But I bet I could make the same thing with air popped popcorn and Bacon Salt, a recipe Michael posted over at Arkansas Foodies.

I've seen these bacon cups all over the internet, made by lining the inside of the cups in a cupcake pan and baking until the bacon is crisp.



Fill them with scrambled eggs and toppings, or maybe tomatoes and chopped avocado.

I could even conceive of making an apple pie with a lattice bacon crust.



I might even be tempted to give bacon Coke a try.



But of course, creativity and bacon-love apparently knows no bounds, for we head into the slightly bizarre realm.

I'm not quite sure how you would keep your beer from leaking all over the table, but beer from a bacon mug might be interesting. Maybe you'd just have to drink it very, very fast.



So, you say you want your car to smell like you cooked breakfast in the back seat? Voila! Bacon air freshener.



And after a meal of liver and onions, with bacon of course, you might want to chew on a toothpick for awhile. Why not prolong the flavor of the meal you've just eaten with, what else, bacon flavored toothpicks.



Or, if you're not really a toothpick sort of person and prefer the solitude of the bathroom to clean between your teeth, there's always bacon flavored dental floss.



And when you're done cleaning between your teeth, freshen your breath with bacon mints (isn't that sort of an oxymoron?).



But I could not write a post about bacon without including my personal favorite, Kevin Bacon.




So back to the bacon vodka.

Mike's use of habañero peppers was a little too hot for me so I decided to cut the heat some and pulled a couple of frozen roasted poblano peppers from the freezer. Last summer's crop. I thought the roasted pepper would impart a nice heat but not too hot.

Then I started looking around for ideas on how to best impart a stronger bacon flavor and came across a process called "fat wash".

A fat wash is based on an old method of making perfumes called Enfleurage. The technique uses fresh flowers, plain rubbing alcohol and beef suet. Animal fats absorb strong odors and flavors, as does alcohol, so any strong odor carried in the fat is imparted to the alcohol. Hence, when imparting flavor into the vodka (alcohol), if you cook the bacon, rendering out the fat, then steep the cooked bacon in the vodka, you leave the strongest bacon odor and flavor in the bacon drippings. Hence, you need to do a fat wash.

For my first try, I decided to make only a quart. I cooked six slices of bacon on medium heat to render out as much of the fat as possible and I was left with six slices of crispy bacon....



...and about a third of a cup of rendered bacon fat....



Those little black things in the bacon fat are whole pepper corns I thought I would toss in to add a peppery flavor to the finished product. It didn't work all that well.

I poured a medium grade 80 proof vodka (Smirnoff) into the warm bacon fat, screwed the lid on tight and shook the jar to emulsify the the vodka and bacon fat, like making a salad dressing. I wanted to transfer as much flavor as possible from the fat to the alcohol, so I shook the jar about every 10 or 15 minutes. For a couple of hours, each time the fat rose to the top, I shook the jar again.



After about two hours, I let the contents of the jar rest, allowing all the fat to rise to the top. Then I put the jar in the freezer for a few hours to allow the fat to completely solidify.

When the fat had completely hardened, I removed the fat cap, then strained the vodka through a coffee filter. I put the strained vodka into a clean jar, added the cooked bacon and the two roasted and seeded poblano peppers, sealed it tight and put it in the cabinet for two weeks.



Yes, I know it looks like some sort of science experiment, but baby you can taste the bacon, even in a bloody mary. But the poblano....not so much. That was the fail.

So on our trip to Walmart yesterday I purchased two nice sized fresh jalapeño peppers to use to make another batch, but this time I want to increase the heat level a couple of notches.

I'll keep you posted.

Happy Medicare Birthday Tom....The Celebratory Beverage

This is the final post in the Birthday Menu series and this is the menu.

I have a confession. This drink is on the menu but we didn't really have it, at least not this time. We opted for a glass of white wine instead, but since I included the drink on the menu that's the recipe I'm sharing.

I'm on the Bon Appetit recipe newsletter list. I receive it by email every week. Last April, the newsletter highlighted the recipe for this cocktail. We finally tried the cocktail in May and happily mixed it up several times throughout the summer until the mint in my garden succumbed to the ultra-brutal July/August heat. When we lived on 10-acres, mint grew wild all over our property and I briefly considered taking a trip out there, but since I'm certain the new owners of the property would not have appreciated my mint-scavenging presence, I reluctantly made the trip to the store to buy it. It's worth it.



Yes, those are little green things floating around in the cocktail. It's the mint. And I know it looks a little like algae. In the spirit of full disclosure, one of the six people who tried the cocktail and reviewed it said emphatically "SWAMP WATER!" Quite honestly, I've never tasted swamp water, so I can't really tell you whether or not the review is accurate. But if swamp water tastes a little sweet, minty and lemony with a nice bubbly finish, then perhaps I should give it a try because I'm sure I'd love it as much as I love this cocktail. Don't let the little green floaty things stop you from trying this.

The only change we made to the recipe is to reduce the sugar to one tablespoon instead of two. The Limoncello is a sweet lemon liqueur and also provides sweetness.



Limoncello Champagne Cocktails with Mint
Adapted from Epicurious.com

• 1/4 cup fresh mint leaves
• 1/4 cup limoncello
• 2 tablespoons sugar plus additional for dipping Champagne flutes
• Lemon peel strips from 1 lemon
• 4 teaspoons fresh lemon juice plus 1 lemon wedge
• 1 cup (about) chilled Champagne or sparkling wine

Place mint, limoncello, 2 tablespoons sugar, and lemon strips in blender; blend until mint is finely chopped (lemon peel will be coarsely chopped), 10 seconds. Strain into small cup; discard solids. Run lemon wedge around rim of 2 Champagne flutes. Dip rims into sugar. Divide limoncello mixture and lemon juice between flutes. Top with Champagne.

POM Wonderful Pomegranate Juice

When I was a kid growing up in Fresno, California, my mother would bring home whole pomegranates given to her by co-workers who grew them in the trees in their yards. Mom would cut the pomegranate in half for me, the only assistance I would receive, and I would sit on the lawn in the back yard with a paper napkin in my lap and pick out the red seeds one by one and pop them into my mouth. When I could no longer reach the seeds with my fingers, I'd gently peel back the skin and pry away the white membrane to reach even more seeds. It would generally take more than an hour to completely devour one whole pomegranate, single seed by single seed, and when I finished, my mouth and fingers would be stained bright red and my legs would speckled from the red juice. But not one seed escaped.

I don't think I've eaten a pomegranate since I was a teenager...a very, very, very long time ago.

Just in the last couple of years, I discovered pomegranate juice was being sold in stores, first in the smaller bottles and now in quarts and I've been buying it regularly ever since. But, in the last couple of months, I noticed that many regular food bloggers were using pomegranate juice in everything and praising all things pomegranate because they had received free samples of pomegranate juice. WTH???

So I did it. I did what I sometimes do best. I whined. Publicly. I whined too much about all the other bloggers getting their free samples of POM Wonderful while I made my weekly trip to WalMart to purchase my POM Wonderful with my own money. I suppose POM Wonderful finally took pity on me and guess what I got ~ Yaaayyy!! Free POM Wonderful!

Now you know that I already used pomegranate juice (when I purchased it with my own money) in that barbecue sauce I made a while back. And, I use it in the that refreshing summer drink recipe I also shared in the same post. Of course, I also use it in a pomegranate martini. But what else? I have a box full of those bottles.

I have some ideas. Like reducing the juice down into a syrup and using it to flavor mascarpone cheese for a dessert. Or maybe using it to flavor a salad dressing. Or how about a citrus and pomegranate glaze for salmon. So, I'll be working on those recipes in the next few days to see if I can come up with something delicious to share.

In the meantime, thanks POM Wonderful and Molly for the delicious stash!

I hope this doesn't make me a shill.