Bacon experiment number 3: Nirvana

PREFACE: Note to all concerned about my health: this is my last bacon adventure. I promise (for now, anyway).

Some time ago I heard about a restaurant in Texas that was serving chicken-fried bacon with cream gravy as an appetizer. What's not to love about that?

I'm not fussed about the gravy part, although I understand it's a key component of traditional chicken-fried steak. For the unitiated, "chicken-fried" means that the food is dredged in a simple flour/milk/egg batter and then fried in oil like fried chicken. No real chickens are involved.

When I started reading and hearing more about chicken-fried bacon, I immediately wondered what the texture and the taste would be like. Soooooo, off to the kitchen.

I won't trouble you with a grand photo sequence on my preparation of this truly heart-stopping dish. I battered the bacon (just saying that makes my mouth water) and deep-fried it in peanut oil, a few strips at a time, in my trusty cast-iron pan. If I had a real deep-fat fryer I would have used that.
As it turned out, the biggest challenge was keeping the oil at a consistent temperature. Everything else was almost ridiculously easy.

And the taste. Wow. I've had deep-fried bacon plenty of times before, as have many of you who have eaten in restaurants; it's an efficient and quick way of cooking larger quantities of bacon. The difference here is the coating; it gives a little extra crunch, and if it's properly seasoned with black pepper, cayenne and such, it gives the bacon a little extra depth. Surprisingly - at least to me, anyway - the frying didn't intensify the traditional smoke and salt flavours of the bacon. What was intensified, of course, was the fat content. As with the Bacon Explosion or its Canadian relative the Bacon Eh-xplosion (see below), a little of this stuff goes a long way. I just tried a couple of strips without any sauce of any kind; if I had used any kind of gravy, I think my arteries would have seized up just on principle.

There. I've done it. I'm not convinced I'll ever do it again, although I have to admit I'm a little curious about how other types of coating (specifically beer batter and tempura batter) might work. Maybe I'll start blogging about other stuff again now.