iPhone Bacon

There is now a bacon application for iPhones.

Not only does it allow you to experience virtual bacon sizzling on your phone (if only it could somehow produce the smell!) but it will also, apparently, tell you about nearby restaurants that serve bacon, and also features an RSS feed that will tell you the latest bacon-related internet news (I wonder if this site is included. I kind of doubt it, alas.). All that bacon, straight to your iPhone or iPod touch for only $1.99! 

EDIT:

I stand corrected. I just received an email, subject line "Oh yes, we do read your site".

Do not f*ck with these people. THEY SEE ALL.

EDIT:

Also, they are very nice, friendly people who treated me to a free copy of the program. Review coming soon - I'm still test-driving it.

Crazy for Flavour, Bacon Salt in Europe

I received a lovely email this morning from Stu, a bacon enthusiast who is working to bring bacon salt to Europe and the UK. So for those of you living in those oh-so-very deprived nations, craving some pork-free bacon flavor, here you go! Stu is also interested in bringing bacon salt to the Middle East, thinking that people there will appreciate a way to get around the ban on pork. I'm not sure I agree with him on that one. I definitely disagree with his opinion that Middle Eastern food tastes like **** to Westerners, because it happens to be one of my favorite cuisines. And I kind of wish he wouldn't promote and disseminate such harmful stereotypes, because Westerners are already awfully close-minded when it comes to trying foreign foods, and this makes it all the more difficult to find food that hasn't been dulled down to suit a Western palate. But anyways.

Also, check out the blog, Crazy 4 Flavour, which features a lot of bacon salt recipes. Personally, I think I'll be using actual bacon when I give them a try, but whatever floats your boat. The recipes are definitely incredibly delicious looking.

Toad in the Hole

Ok, ok, so this isn't, strictly speaking, a bacon dish, but it did involve bacon in its creation, and it was seriously fantastic, so I figure why not. 

It may seem like a basic concept, poke a hole in a piece of bread and fry an egg in it, but there is ARTISTRY involved. If you don't believe me, check out my first attempt:

This is more like if somebody had tried to extract the toad from its hole using dynamite.

So, the basics are obvious perhaps, but I'm going to give you the step-by-step process that produces a truly beautiful toad in a hole. At least, by my standards.

Step 1: Fry a couple slices of bacon in a pan until crispy. Set aside, leaving (of course!) the glorious fat in the pan.

Step 2: Make a hole in a slice of bread. You want it to be about 2 inches in diameter, I'd say - big enough for the toad to fit in. Otherwise, your yolk'll break and doomy doom will ensue (see exhibit A).

Step 3: Place bread in pan. Brown one side, allowing it to absorb some greasy goodness, then flip it.

Step 4: Crack egg into hole - carefully. Some of the white will spill over the top. It's ok. In fact, you can sort of spread the white over the bread a bit so as to help it cook faster. 

Step 5: When the white that spilled over is fully cooked, and the egg generally appears mostly cooked, aside from the filmy layer on the top, grab a spatula, and, using a steady hand, remove the piece of bread from the pan. Then, holding it, carefully put it back in the pan, face down. You get it? Basically, you're flipping it. However, given the toad's fragile nature, it's actually more effective to remove it and flip the pan. 

Step 5: Cook for maybe 30 seconds more - if that. What you're going for here is cooked whites, runny yolk. So you want it in there just long enough to cook that filmy top layer, but not longer. 

Remove from pan. Arrange bacon on the sides in quasi-artistic fashion. I recommend sprinkling it with hot sauce at this point, but if you're gonna photograph it, do that first. It should look like this:

That's a fine looking toad.

And the inside of the yolk should look like this:

Intro bio assignments never looked this tasty.

A good strategy to approach the creature is to begin by dunking the bacon in the yolk, then picking the shortest side and attacking, later using the remnants of bread to mop off the plate.

Yum.

This is Why You're Fat

It's not explicitly about bacon, but I suppose it's not surprising to see plenty of bacon inspired entries: This is Why You're Fat is a blog that features creative unhealthy foods. These generally take the form of either deep frying some stuff, or of combining a bunch of unhealthy things into a kind of unholy calorie behemoth. Most of it isn't all that appealing, but some of it does look kind of delicious. Bacon wrapped mozarella? Hamburger crust pizza? Deep fried black pudding? Yummo. But I gotta say, it annoys the hell out of me when people just throw together the most high calorie things they can and deep fry them just for the hell of it. Respect your food man, shit. Don't just throw the bacon on for some token calories. Love the bacon. Savour its fantastic flavors. Just because a lot of delicious things contain a lot of calories, it doesn't mean that a lot of calories are always delicious.