I almost feel compelled to go back to my January posting to change its title to "Chicken 'n' chili" to go for a threepeat of the use of the conjunction " 'n' " but I digress already (maybe I should stop reading Tristram Shandy)...
Bacon 'n' bourbon - the expo! The fat, the salt, the smoke, the liquor! The semi-educational experience providing a thin veneer of respectability to the collective decadence! The many grease-covered fingers, including my own, grappling with camera-ready devices to document our love of pork! The overuse of exclamation points that tends to manifest itself when discussing cured and smoked fatty pig parts!!!
Okay, if you want to read a respectable and informative review of the recent expo at Astor Center, I recommend that you head over to this Voice post, which provides the full text of the loving ode to bacon that Feedbag editor Josh Ozersky recited to an appreciative group of pig and American whiskey philes, along with a listing of the bourbons available that evening.
I won't provide anything so thorough, mostly because my recollections of the evening were fuzzed out by an ongoing battle with a head cold that I'd hoped the bourbons would help cure. I'm not going to write much about the bourbons at all, as I was slightly disappointed that I encountered only a few things that I hadn't already tried; I'm also hoping to provoke Thaler, a much better epicure than me who gets the credit for alerting me to the b-n-b fest, into providing her tasting notes in the comments section of this posting (hint hint).
Now, focus on the bacon: if I recall correctly, there were at least seven different bacons circulated at the expo (not counting the jerky / sausage, which I took a pass on as Thaler said they were somewhat tasteless). It was hard not to break out constantly into drooling impressions of Homer Simpson, and critiquing bacon itself felt slightly silly. At one point, I commented on a bacon that it was my least favorite of the evening, but instantly felt a need to add loudly and grinningly "but it's still bacon!" You just can't get too high-minded about this stuff, you know.
The two best items, though, were the D'Artagnan uncured smoked wild boar bacon, pictured at top and, above, the "fresh" bacon deep fried in lard (did you get that? DEEP FRIED IN LARD) created by alchemist / pit master Scott Smith of RUB aka Righteous Urban Barbeque. Both had intense flavors, well proportioned and balanced among salt, smoke, fat and meat (how did Josh put it? Fat is to meat as meat is to vegetables? I'd like to see that on an SAT or GRE analogy section!) - and little sweetness compared to most bacons. The boar was wonderfully dense, the RUB bacon chunky and hearty. The boar I can fully imagine substituting for "normal" bacon in most contexts, a bacon turned up to 11, but the RUB bacon reminded me of my mom's triple-cooked pork with cabbage and the wonderful things that Chinese cooks can do with pork because they have no fear of fat and know that that's where the flavor's at! Lucky for us NYCers gustatorily but not calorically, the house cured, triple smoked, lard fried bacon chunks are available as an appetizer at RUB. Thaler asked Smith about the science behind his method, and, as in scientific experimentation and cooking, serendipity played a role - part of his method was dictated simply by the hours of the restaurant (they had to turn the smoker off at some point), but the results worked out beautifully.
Since it's now lunchtime-ish, I'll sign off to think about what to do with my one slab of bacon currently in the fridge and to look at my calendar to see whether I can wedge in a visit to RUB for dinner this week.
"semi-educational experience"?!?!?! I learned a lot!!!
Hudson Spirits are the bomb: http://tuthilltown.com/QUALITY/home.html
The Baby Bourbon, and the Rye. And I tasted two products that are just now appearing in stores, a whiskey made from all the leftovers - seriously - that tasted like an upstate NY grass field in July. Yum! It was called, I think, "American Whiskey". And a rye that was made with the leftover rye - not so great.
Josh was a bit purer in his statement: "The fat IS the meat, and the meat IS the vegetable." I also liked his description of The Bacon Compass: salt, sugar, hickory, smoke. Each bacon will point in one direction.
He also recommended Benton's Bacon, which I'm, um, pretty sure we tasted and thought was terrific, available at http://gratefulpalate.com/?p=Category_12
I had a blast! Give people bacon, and boy, are they happy!!
Posted by: Thaler | February 09, 2009 at 10:14 PM