LITTLE ROCK — Bacon, bacon, bacon!
“Bacon everywhere” will be one of this year’s hot trends, according to the J.
Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York. Pork bacon ranks alongside 3-D television, electric cars, ever-smarter smart phones, Brazil and actor Zach Galifianakis, who looks like he might know his way around a side of bacon, on Thompson’s annual list of “100 Things to Watch.”
The agency tips off corporate clients including Kraft, Kellogg’s and the chocolate-egg maker, Cadbury. They could have listened just as well to Homer Simpson when he said, “Mmmm! Move over, eggs. Bacon just got a new best friend - fudge.”
Bacon and chocolate go together in ways as messy as a Pig Licker - bacon in chocolate syrup - at the Arkansas State Fair, and as upscale as a bacon-chocolate bar from Vosges Haut-Chocolat of Chicago.
“People are obsessed with bacon,” according to the trade journal, My Foodservice News, and not just bacon to eat. “The market is flooded with quirky bacon products.”
Bacon-flavored toothpicks and dental floss, for example, are out of the frying pan and onto Amazon.com. The bacon-scented soap is out of stock, sorry, but the bacon tasting jelly beans prompt a customer review that tells just how far some people will go for bacon. The jelly beans rate second to “bacon-flavored cat food” in the opinion of someone who, apparently, has tried both.
Rosemary Rodibaugh, a nutrition specialist with the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture in Little Rock, sees the trend as a bacon-greased backslide - the very opposite of the low-fat, healthy eating she recommends.
“Bacon is almost pure fat, mostly saturated fat,” she says. Add “generally a lot of sodium,” and bacon wraps around a bundle of worries in regard to bad cholesterol and heart trouble.
“It is not,” the nutritionist says, “a healthy food.”
Bacon has been around a long time, though - probably as long as pork bellies - and its reputation as the bad boy of the breakfast table is an old concern.
In fact, scientists measure how bad something is for a person to eat by comparing it to bacon. When the Center
for Science in the Public Interest wants
to warn people off doughnuts, they say a
cake doughnut is “like eating eight strips
of bacon.” But the other big thing about bacon is equally well known, and so true that even Rodibaugh has to acknowledge it: “Bacon tastes good. Bacon tastes real good.” “I went to a party where they served caramelized bacon as appetizer,” she says. Bacon sprinkled with brown sugar, heated to melt the sugar ...“Nobody could eat just one piece.”
BACON NATION
Bacon is no all-of-a-sudden discovery in the South. It’s the secret to home-style Southern cooking - the can of bacon drippings on the stove, and the bacon in a pot of greasy greens. To be a Southerner is to make some kind of peace with bacon, often terms of total surrender to a bacon, lettuce and bright-red Arkansas tomato sandwich.
But a now-and-then indulgence is one thing, and full-blown craze is a different cut of cured meat. What else but a craze could account for the grocery store’s ready-to-serve cooked bacon (hurry-hurry 20 seconds in the microwave)? - and Wendy’s Baconator hamburger with six strips of bacon, and the sandwich spread with bacon in it, Baconnaise.
“Baconnaise,” Jon Stewart quipped on The Daily Show, “for people who want to get heart disease but, you know, [are] too lazy to actually make bacon.”
Rodibaugh says she understands why people go for bacon - “I love bacon ...” - but not the passion for it that defeats all sense of control: that makes for a Wikipedia entry on “bacon mania”; Web sites devoted to bacon (baconunwrapped. com); “I bacon” T-shirts, and the National PorkBoard’s finding that bacon is the No. 1 pork product on restaurant menus.
Bacon is like a cigar, maybe, an act of rebellion against political correctness. Could be that people are fed up with being told what to eat. Bacon might be how people respond to “information overload,” the nutritionist guesses. “I don’t know what it is.”
BACON MANIA TIMELINE
One reason bacon is hot - it’s been crackling on the burner for years:
The 1970s: Enjoli perfume ads on TV show a sultry blonde with a frying pan. “I can bring home the bacon,” she croons, “fry it up in a pan, and never, never, never let you forget you’re a man.”
The bacon-is-sexy sentiment echoes in today’s Taco Bell commercials, in which a cutie on the dating scene packs a Bacon Club Chalupa in her clutch purse for the bacon smell. In no time, she attracts a smitten hunk.
“What’s that you’re wearing?” he comes on, “sniff!”
The 1980s and ’90s: The Atkins Diet specifies a high protein, low-carbohydrate regimen to lose weight. In a word: bacon. Low-carbohydrate dieters have Dr. Robert Atkins’ go-ahead to live high on the hog (though in fact bacon lovers are generally eating low on the hog, from the belly).
2004: Chef Heston Blumenthal’s gourmet restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Berkshire, England, serves up “scrambled eggs and bacon ice cream” as part of its “Not So Full English Breakfast.”
2008: The bacon bra is all over the Internet. Pictures proliferate of a woman whose intimate attire is made entirely of raw bacon: Streaky bacon (American style), to be precise, the kind with stripes of meat and white fat. Back bacon (Irish bacon), picnic bacon and Canadian bacon all have their uses, but they don’t provide the same support.
2009: Bacon-alia, according to a recent announcement, will make Atlanta home to the world’s first all-bacon restaurant, where everything on the menu will be bacon, wrapped in bacon, topped with bacon, stuffed with bacon.
2010: Bacon everywhere:
BACON FOR THE CAUTIOUS
Turkey bacon. The Fresh Market in Little Rock makes a specialty of this leaner alternative to pork bacon.
Tofu bacon. And then, there’s bacon-wrapped tofu.
FOR THE BOLD
Bacon Explosion. A sizzling challenge for the tailgate and grill enthusiast: The recipe calls for a blanket woven out of strips of bacon, rolledaround a filling of sausage and more bacon, all in all about the size of a football.
FOR THE SHOPPER
“Two equally obsessive foods come together” in Mo’s Chocolate-Bacon Bar, $7.50 from Vosge’s Haut-Chocolat of Chicago at vosgeschocolate.com.
Maple-bacon lollipops are $24 a dozen from Lollyphile, a San Francisco candy-maker, at lollyphile.com.
Peppered Bacon Farm Bread is $13 a loaf from Zingerman’s of Ann Arbor, Mich., at zingermans.com.
Bacon Peanut Brittles ( bacon, peanuts, maple syrup, cayenne pepper) is $21.99 a pound from The Redhead, a restaurant in New York’s East Village, at theredheadnyc.com.
The Bacon of the Month Club delivers a lineup including cob-smoked, cinnamon sugar and jalapeno bacon for about $300 a year from The Grateful Palate of Fairfield, Calif., at gratefulpalate.com.
FOR THE TRAVELER
Frank Restaurant in Austin, Texas, touts a signature Bloody Mary called the Red-Headed Stranger: house-made, bacon infused vodka with a strip of bacon for a swizzle stick.
(Bakon Vodka - “Pure. Refreshing. Bacon.” - is a bottled brand in short supply.)
“Basket of bacon” at the Comet Cafe in Milwaukee, where the menu adds: “We’re not kidding.”
THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT HOME
Arkansas is the center of the bacon universe from way back, from roadside smokehouses to the 81-year old Morrilton Packing Co. in Morrilton, home of Petit Jean brand Hickory Smoked, Hickory Smoked Thick Sliced and Peppered Bacon.
Company President David Ruff counts a million pounds of bacon a year, but says he didn’t know about “bacon mania,” only that sales in Arkansas predictably go up when the tomatoes are ripe.
“Just fry it,” is Ruff ’s advice, or cook it in the microwave, but he’s not the man to ask about bacon vodka happy hours and bacon candy suckers.
“When you live in Morrilton,” he says, the latest trends “take a few years todrift down.”
Petit Jean Bacon Ice Cream?
“Since we don’t even have the capability to make ice cream,” the bacon man considers the possibility, “that’s a no.”
Style, Pages 19 on 02/16/2010