Curing myself of life’s bad bacon
Remove the stems from the chillies, slice each in half and use the tip of a teaspoon to scrape out the seeds. Roughly chop the chillies.
Heat the oil in a small pot and add the chillies, garlic and salt.
Cook, stirring, for five minutes then add one cup of water. Bring to the boil then reduce to a simmer for 15 minutes.
Remove from the heat, then add coriander and use a whiz stick to blend until smooth.
Allow to cool for half an hour, then add the lime zest and mayonnaise and whiz again until smooth. Bacon is not that great. I said it.
It’s gone from occasional Sunday morning treat to subject of gushing social media posts, propelled to a cult-like status: there’s bacon jam, bacon beer, chocolate bacon, bacon candles, maple-bacon doughnuts, bacon icecream. Will it stop?
Given the world’s obsession with it, it’s odd people continue to eat the flaccid piece of tepid mouth-lining ick from supermarkets without thinking about what could be better.
Bacon is bacon, as much as wine is wine. It’s not one thing, and the vast majority is really bad. I understand the smokey, salty, hopefully crispy, slices of pig meat have their own special allure but more often than not, it’s far from what people eat.
In all of its forms, and its derivatives, it provides a great support in soups or long-braised dishes, but what most of us are eating is salty chewing gum.
Too often it’s a wet, soppy and gummy mess that has to be pulled at like a dog with a rope toy to get a mouthful.
Don’t get me wrong, smokey and salty are two things I love, but I don’t love them enough to accept the everyday bacon as bacon. It’s more like a wet pork leather.
It’s a wonder the punchlineof the ‘‘I could be vegan but...’’ trope continues to be bacon (there’s vegan bacon now, keep in mind, a god awful smoke-flavoured cardboard brittle), when there are so many other delicious meat products worth pining over.
Given the obsession, it beggars belief that bacon has not generally stepped up since people started fetishising the stuff.
Fast food restaurants still serve their jerky-like cardboard, sloppy bacon is a mainstay on cafe menus paired with burnt bananas and fake maple syrup, but we just keep buying it.
The bacon cured by butchers only needs to be tried to understand how far supermarkets’ and other imposters’ bacons are from the real deal, so full of soupy brine they end up a plush shade of pink and grey in a pool of water. Having a soggy piece of grey bacon is equal only to a soggy hash brown.
Most butchers will provide thick slices of any type of bacon you choose, cured and smoked to a point where there is a concentrated and distinct flavour - not just one of salt. It is something you can chew without masticating like a cow, and something that won’t line your mouth for the rest of the day. You’ll get proper bacon.
At the very least, spend what you would on a kilogram of bad bacon on a few slices of the good stuff and thank me later.
The sheer amount of bacon saturating social media is fat to the fire. Ever since the inception of YouTube’s Epic Meal Time, the bacon monster has seemingly grown from strength to garish strength, and bacon weaves have become a social media cliche.
It has led to an internet obsession: maple-bacon doughnuts, chocolate bacon, bacon bombs, bacon for the non-bacon eaters: beef, turkey or lamb bacon for those who don’t eat pork. Following a quick Google search one can find bacon earrings, watches, shaving cream and toothpaste too.
Maple-bacon doughnuts are just too much, a sweet and overly rich fad cash-in; chocolate bacon is a crime against food; and fake bacons are always a chewy sinewladen fail.
I’ve suffered through too much of this type of bacon and have decided enough is enough, I’m sick of it. ‘But what will you have instead?’, you ask.
Nothing. I don’t need to substitute it with anything else. The full English breakfast without bacon is still worth having, there are still sausages and black pudding to weigh you down. Eggs Benedict is always better with salmon, pancakes don’t need bacon, and doughnuts are bad enough for you without bacon anyway.