The ABC's of Cooking: B Is for Bacon

Bacon rocks, pure and simple, in a world where flavors blend and come together in four-part harmony. I’m not talking about a breakfast of bacon strips, hash browns, easy-over eggs and sourdough toast, drenched in butter. No, when it comes to bacon, a little bit’ll do you in more dishes than you can shake a spatula at. 

I have been even luckier than most because I have access to farm-grown bacon. This is not the kind of bacon that you could cook in strips; I dice it up in different sizes, depending on what I am preparing, and use the grease to sauté up my onions/shallots/garlic, et al. Bacon grease with a follow-up of homegrown chicken or bone broth, is my favorite way to sauté veggies. 

When farm-grown bacon is not available, though, I am simply buying my uncured, natural bacon with no toxic additives, and putting it into the freezer. Whenever I need it, I pull it out of the freezer, give it a while on the counter, and then use my big iron to chop a chunk of it up, the same knife I use to cut up a whole chicken. Any knife will do as long as it is sharp. If your knives need sharpening, Scott is at the Laytonville market one Monday per month, so bring in your knives so you can be on top of your game.

I do not use enough bacon to dominate the flavor of any dish; I try to never allow one spice or herb to stand out in a meal. Ideally, the different flavors blend and create the desired taste as a team. I usually add salt at the end of any other spices or herbs and I do it incrementally. You can always add more but you can’t take it out once it’s in. I find it is worth the extra minute to be careful with salt.

I made a side dish of cabbage, chard and baby turnip greens yesterday for lunch, to go with my chicken in white wine and mustard sauce. As always, I started with three or four ounces of diced bacon so as to use the grease to sauté the shallot and a couple of cloves of fresh garlic. These days it could even be green garlic, since it is in season. I added a quarter-cup of balsamic vinegar and a tablespoon of maple syrup to the shallots/garlic, along with salt and black pepper before I put in the greens.

I use a giant wok so that when I add the chopped greens with a medium fire on underneath, I can put the lid on for a few minutes to reduce the volume of greenery. And I add broth as needed to make sure that the balsamic vinegar and maple syrup mix evenly with all of those greens.

I use bacon as a base ingredient for chili con carne, for cooking a pot of pinto beans, for shepherd’s pie, chili chicken, rancho steak, any kind of stew or soup, side dishes of greens, cabbage, baby turnips, zucchini, green beans (!), German potato salad and so many more dishes.

The amount of bacon I use is not prohibitively expensive, as I can get three or four meals out of one twelve-ounce package of store-bought bacon. Expensive enough, for sure, but I feel worth the cost.

The flavor of the bacon should balance itself with additions of such ingredients as fresh onions/shallots/leeks/scallions, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, basil, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce, maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, Tamari sauce, garlic and any others you choose to work with. 

Bacon goes with almost everything and adds one more layer of flavor to your meal. Being the first step in cooking your dish, the smell of bacon mixes with the onions, garlic, et al, and infuses into your kitchen an intoxicatingly delicious fragrance. 

It’s enough to make you think you are living on a farm.