Candied bacon, all the time

August 21, 2012 at 10:02 am (Things I Want)

Ever since one of my coworkers got married and had the best wedding cake ever, I have been craving candied bacon. (She actually had a variety of wedding cakes, but the best one was the cupcakes with bacon on them, because bacon.)

And so, after some experimentation (a.k.a. “googling”), I found a wonderful recipe, care of Lords of Bacon (a.k.a. “my heroes”) for candied bacon.

Thank you, Lords of Bacon, for your service to our world.

Now, I know this isn’t a recipe blog, it’s a humor blog (supposedly. I mean, I laugh at it, but I’ve always thought I was rather clever), but I still think (most of) you guys deserve the recipe for candied bacon, so here it is:

• Take some bacon. Probably about a pound or so. In a large bowl, pour some brown sugar. Roll the bacon in the brown sugar — one at a time is probably best, because, while wads of bacon are yummy, wads of candied bacon make a considerable mess — and place it on the baking tin that you probably should have already prepared by covering with tin foil and then spraying the tin foil with cooking spray. (Lords of Bacon and other blogs recommend some sort of wire rack for cookies goes on top of this, but who the hell has one of those? You can always tell your guests that the pieces of tin foil you couldn’t manage to peel off the bacon is the prize or something.)

Yeah, look at this fancy-pants candied bacon on its highfalutin wire rack.

• After all the bacon has been rolled in the brown sugar and placed on the baking tin or cookie wire rack or whatever, toss them in the oven. I mean, keep them on the tin or wire rack, and put them carefully in the oven. Which should have been set at 350 degrees. (I’m sorry. This is why this isn’t a cooking blog.) If you’ve got any leftover brown sugar, you might as well sprinkle it over the top of the bacon well before it goes into the oven, or you’ll probably burn yourself.
• The bacon should cook for about 30 minutes. Around the halfway mark, you’re supposed to take some tongs and flip the bacon over, but that’s really hard to do so I usually skip that step. If you’ve left the bacon in long strips, 30 minutes should be about right. If you’ve cut them in half, say, on your mother’s recommendation, then 30 minutes will probably be too long and you shouldn’t get complacent just because it was right the first time you tried it and let the bacon burn. So for bacon cut in half, it’s probably more like 25 minutes.
• Of course, this all depends on your oven, so I actually recommend just checking the bacon every few minutes at the end, because you want it crispy, but not burnt. The reason you want it crispy is because it is covered in brown sugar, which makes it a bit soggy, so if the bacon doesn’t get crispy, it will be like trying to eat sugar/bacon-flavored glue.
• Anyway, once the bacon reaches that state of perfection, remove it from the oven and let it cool for a while. Remember those tongs you should’ve used halfway through but probably didn’t? Go ahead and use them now to transfer the bacon to a plate with wax paper on it, peeling off as much tin foil as possible and giving the tin-foily bacon to your least favorite people.

And there you go! You have now achieved nirvana.

Yeah, sorry about that, vegans.