Bacon comes in twelve distinct flavors of salty, fatty hog flesh that can be found anywhere and everywhere. In Baltimore, you best bet is Lexington Market, where you can pick up the proper thick-cut low water stuff. It's cheaper and better than Oscar Meyer.
The biggest problem with the garden variety is what all that water does in the pan. Supposedly you've got hot metal, molten fat, and pork in the skillet. That should easily spend most of its time above 300 Fahrenheit -- well into the range where the Maillard reactions start to happen. The bacon should get a beautiful brown, golden tinge. That's the same thing (sort of) that happens in cooking bread, in roasting meat, in caramel, in all things that taste good and get golden. The problem with too much water is no browning, all boiling and steaming. And boiled bacon is just a weird English thing.
Most of the time spent cooking supermarket bacon is spent getting rid of the water, then all the cooking happens in three minutes when you're not looking and everything goes wrong. Trust me, take the light rail down to the Lexington Market, or the JHMI shuttle out to the medical school and then the Northeast Market (there's even a guy there who'll sell you bacon ends!) These wonderful extra bits get thrown into delicious little baggies that you can use to help flavor your greens, or just eat as little pieces of bacon art.
Everything goes with bacon. It's not just for breakfast anymore--bacon has moved on. Meaty, rich and greasy, it's more American than apple pie. Bacon is hardcore. Here's how it's done: pigs have fatty bellies, and this truth is more beautiful than democracy. Harvest that layer of muscle and fat, cure it in brine (to slightly pickle it), and finally, stick it in a cold smoker.
For the cold smoker, aromatic fruitwood, hardwood, or hickory burn in a box. The smoke is then run up through a pipe, past some cold water, and on to the target pork belly, or stoner. That way no flies will eat the toked up pork belly, the meat stays uncooked, and your throat doesn't get scorched.
Put that bacon in a dry pan, and its own glorious fat will lubricate it and crisp the pork to golden, unctuous perfection. The lean bits will crunch and the fatty bits will dissolve in this mysterious way that will make you think the resurrection of Christ really isn't such a big deal.
Sidebar for those interested in sushi: Toro is tuna bacon. You serve the toro raw and the bacon smoked and fried, the way it should be. (If you bake or broil your bacon you are weak and foolish. If you're going to eat bacon eat bacon! For junk-food consumption, remember: all things in moderation, including moderation.) And now that I think about it, toro and bacon sounds pretty damn good. Put the taste of sushi-grade tuna in your mouth. Instead of soy sauce with wasabi in it, mutate that saltiness in your mouth towards the porcine. Instead of the horseradish and acid salt, you get the smoke and pig salt. Seriously, that smokiness from the bacon matches so well with fish. Just imagine it: the glorious ju-ju of smoked salmon through the fatty underbellies of a pig and a bluefin tuna.
Alain Ducasse, the very famous French chef who charges $500 for dinner nightly at any of his very many restaurants, says that everything needs salt. Bacon is salt. Bobby Flay, the Food TV hunk extraordinaire and New York restaurateur who stole the Iron Chef rematch from Morimoto, always calls deep fried stuff "crispy," so that customers on a diet will order it.
But the important question about bacon, miracle meat, lies in its versatility. Is it possible to combine bacon with some otherwise tasty food and get crap? I say no. But here are some handy examples to provide some hard evidence.
Most people concede that bacon complements anything savory. The challenge, then, is the bacon dessert. It isn't really that hard to do, since pork has long been paired with fruit. Think of that roast pig from the early days of Julia Child, the one with the apple in its mouth. Pork and fruit is old school. And from there we have an entry into the sweet. It is harder with bacon than with, say, a honeyed ham, or ribs, or chops, but that's mostly due to the smoke. I'll leave bacon and straight fruit alone as too easy, but strawberry shortcake is a serious issue.
Consider the components of the shortcake -- strawberries, cream, shortbread (but I've always preferred a baking soda biscuit). Mixing strawberries and bacon brings down the strawberry's fresh brightness, its acidic, cool, and juicy tang. The bacon makes it earthy. To avoid an over-salted flavor; you'd have to use a smokier bacon. Whipped cream and bacon isn't so hard. Most American whipped cream is sweetened to a freakish extent. Moderate that sweet tooth and you're left with a dairy foam suitable for sweet or savory. The strawberries make it sweet, but the contrast can be tamed into a smooth bridge between meat and fruit with a little coriander and nutmeg in the whipped cream. The shortbread can take the yeasty, buttery side over to the bacon with an extra pinch of salt in the dough. There it is, Baconberry short cake: strawberries reborn with a dark side.
Cheesecake and bacon. Doesn't need explanation, doesn't require thought. You'd think such a quintessential dessert would resist porky augmentation, but no. Maybe you could sprinkle some coarsely ground black pepper atop the cheesecake to help out the bacon, but it isn't necessary. This kind of contrast, sharp and startling, is not really that original. Heston Blumenthal, a molecular gastronomy chef, who uses a lime jelly to liven up his mashed potatoes. Why? Palate fatigue. When you eat mashed potatoes, or chew gum, your mouth gets ridiculously bored with the same flavor over and over, and stops sending signals to your brain about it. There are just as many flavor-bearing particles in your mouth or nose, but your nervous system has decided to stop caring. Ever take a sip of water when you're chewing gum? Ever wonder why that sip of water tastes really minty? It's because the water gets your tongue to start sending signals again, gum and water both. So when you eat the potatoes, your mouth gets bored, but then your tongue gets a whiff of the lime jelly and says "Holy libations, Batman! What in tarnation is that!" and reminds your brain about the potato, too. Same result with these bacon combinations, you taste more bacon, as well as the other ingredients.
Brussels sprouts. First you must assume that they are worth eating on their own. Once you've gotten this far, it's a hop, skip, and a jump to use salty bacon fat to fry them up in pieces post-steaming, and then to sprinkle crumbled bacon with cayenne pepper atop the sprouts for glorious meta-vegetables.
The most challenging bacon-clad dish involves Altoids.
Nothing goes with strong mint, as proved by orange juice and toothpaste. You all know that flavor -- yuckyuckyuck. It seems like the only option is to grind up the Altoid and sprinkle it over the bacon -- in short, to overwhelm the Altoid. But that wouldn't really be a combination in good faith. Let's add a hot-cold dichotomy to this, refrigerate, or even freeze the Altoids. Pop one in your mouth, then bite some warm and greasy bacon. This bacon shouldn't be too well drained, so there's enough fat to distribute the heat. This will point up the contrast, and make it nearly as elegant as ... well ... chocolate and bacon.
Perhaps these combinations verge on the gastronomically atonal, but that's my prerogative. Sch??nberg's been atonal for nearly a hundred years, and it's damn well time the food world caught up.
The assemblage of food into things that "taste good" is very complicated, nuanced, and satisfying, but there is more to pleasure, there is more to eating, than "good." There is a kind of interesting taste that enlightens the eater's notions about what these ingredients are. There are rewarding juxtapositions that do not occur without the help of a creative impetus from some food-minded artist (food can inspire). It is not all about what "tastes good" and "tastes bad." There is a taste that falls somewhere in the middle, don't be afraid to explore.
