Baconalia – Your Guide to the Bacon Universe

by Larry Clow | Friday, February 13, 2009

Best sign ever on Flickr by miss rogue

PHOTO: Best sign ever on Flickr by miss rogue CC BY-SA

In the beginning, there was bacon, and it was good. But it just wasn’t enough. The only thing better than bacon is more bacon, but there are only so many hours in the day and the human heart can only take so much cholesterol. It was once said necessity is the mother of invention, but necessity has been kicked in the face and conquered by bacon, a greasy, delicious muse that is now the source of most modern innovations. If the efforts devoted to bacon and bacon-related products were applied to, say, space travel or the economy, we’d be planting money trees on Mars within the next year. Luckily for us, our gaze is firmly fixed on our bacon-rich future. The only question is where to begin your bacon journey. The first step, of course, is to fry up some bacon and eat it. But after you do that, you may want to check out some of these decadent delights.

Items of dubious baconicity
Even the more ardent bacon lover must admit, however grudgingly, that there are some instances when the taste of bacon does not make things better. No misguided novelty item proves this better than Uncle Oinker’s Bacon Mints, an unholy combination of cheap Altoids and sub-par bacon flavor. Failing as both a mint and a piece of bacon ephemera, Bacon Mints are best handed out as a goof and not as a savory treat to be enjoyed. The mints themselves are small and chalky and the lackluster mint flavor is brutally pushed aside by the sour bacon flavor. By the end, you’re neither as refreshed as you would be after a normal mint, nor is your all-consuming bacon-lust sated. It’s a lose-lose situation. Any why mess around with the mint, anyway? If you really need a taste of bacon after dinner, go for a bacon-flavored toothpick. Packaged in a sharp-looking tin with a nattily dressed oinker on the front (on his way to The Ritz, by the look of things), bacon-flavored toothpicks deliver a decent bacon flavor while helping you get stringy bits of fat out of your teeth. If only all bacon items were so useful! And, if during some bizarre accident, you stab yourself with a bacon toothpick, you can cover the hickory-flavored wound with a bacon bandage.

Bacon additives
In an effort to add the flavor of bacon to absolutely everything, the dudes at J&D’s have created Bacon Salt and Baconnaise (They are presently hard at work on a Bacon IV Drip for the upcoming wave of bacon-related heart attacks). Bacon Salt is, well, bacon-flavored salt, and comes in a variety of flavors. Original bacon, hickory and peppered were the first three varieties produced by J&D’s, with cheddar, applewood, mesquite, maple, jalepeno and ‘natural’ flavors most recently joining the Bacon Salt family. In a word, it’s delicious. Bacon Salt has a legitimately good bacon flavor, and adding a dash here and there to your favorite dish yields tasty results. Baconnaise reportedly is just as good; however, my absolute prohibition on mayonnaise—even bacon-flavored mayonnaise—has prevented me from trying it. J&D’s has even produced bacon lip balm which seems more like an invitation to cannibalism than anything else.

For bacon professionals
Remember that episode of The Office where Steve Carrell burns his foot on his George Foreman Grill because he likes to wake up to the smell and sound of cooking bacon in the morning? Someone thought this was an actual real-world problem and solved it. Say hello to the Wake ‘n Bacon, the creation of designer Matty Sallin. The unholy union of an alarm clock and Easy Bake Oven shoved inside a wooden box gussied up to look like a friendly oinker, the Wake ‘n Bacon gently nudges you from sleep each morning by cooking a piece of bacon inside its fiery machine guts. Is it a safety hazard? Probably. But few home injuries are so tasty or inventive.

If starting your day out with bacon isn’t enough, you can end your day (and possibly your life) with the bacon explosion an amalgamation of bacon, sausage and BBQ sauce so decadent that even Calligula himself might urge restraint. The bacon explosion begins with a “weave” of bacon, on top of which is placed a layer of Italian sausage. Some cooked bacon is placed in the middle of the sausage, and the whole concoction is rolled up, slathered in BBQ sauce and placed in a smoker for a couple hours. The end result is a slab of savory pork that may be the pinnacle of our civilization. Sure, we may one day live forever in immortal robot bodies, but what good is immortality compared to the bacon explosion? At least we’ll still have bacon bandages to keep our robot parts together and remind us of the true heights of human achievement.

Larry Clow is a freelance journalist, technical writer and movie critic based in New Hampshire. You can find him online at blog.larryclow.com.