A trendsetter's toast to bacon

Bacon - small strips of Americana (Courtesy Getty Images)

Run a Google search for bacon, and roughly 49 million pages will be returned. That’s just a fraction less than the results for searching President Obama, leader of the free world.

Bacon has adorned breakfast plates for centuries, introduced generations to their first sandwiches and has wrapped, covered or crusted nearly every meat and vegetable in the world. But despite its universal appeal – including $2 billion a year in annual sales and a home inside more than half of all U.S. refrigerators – the salty staple has mounted something of a cultural resurgence.

Jimmy Carbone, owner and occasional chef at Jimmy’s No. 43, has been plating pork since he opened the East Village eatery in 2006. In that time, he’s seen bacon’s transition from everyman fare to haute cuisine.   

"The bacon trend is a fete de complete," said Carbone, who regularly hosts beer and bacon tastings. "A few years ago, bacon was bacon. Then we started to see good, artisanal products and chefs began to offer them. That always starts the trend."

He largely credits the movement to Momofuku’s David Chang, who years ago turned to a small farm in Tennessee to give his bacon dishes a more distinctive flavor.

“David Chang was using a lot of diverse bacons,” Carbone said. “Then he started using Benton’s, a real smoky, real salty bacon. It basically grew from there.”

One man inside Chang’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar is particularly familiar with the magic of Benton’s. He found it so remarkable, in fact, that he decided to put it in a cocktail.

Don Lee, now head bartender at Ssäm Bar, developed a Benton’s bacon-infused Old Fashioned while working at the East Village’s clandestinely hip PDT. 

“I had seen a couple people who were throwing actual pieces of bacon into a jar of vodka,” Lee said, “but nobody was really extracting the flavor cleanly or thinking of it as a serious cocktail ingredient. I felt that barrel flavors of bourbon would work well with the intense smokiness.”

He didn’t waste any time finding out. To infuse the bourbon, he employed a technique called “fat washing” to draw the smoky, rendered flavor from the Benton’s bacon. He stirred the infused-bourbon with Grade B maple syrup and bitters, and then strained it over ice.

PDT added the Benton’s Old Fashioned to its menu, and like proverbial moths to the flame, the patrons lined up.

“The initial response was great,” said Lee, who left PDT for Ssäm Bar in February. “It is amazing to see that it is still popular today. Friends send me e-mails about seeing bars doing the Benton's Bourbon all over the country. I'm just happy to see that people are taking the technique and making their own drinks from it.”

While the Benton’s Old Fashioned sparked a deluge of press coverage and blog posts, ‘Bacon Mania’ continued to grow with popular – if provocative – Web wonders like the Bacon Explosion. Lee understands that creativity can’t exist independently of trendiness. 

“I believe that people are becoming more educated and interested in serious cocktails in the same way that they are more conscious about what they eat,” he said. “As with food, there will always be people who just follow trends, but I believe that people today are looking more for quality and creativity.”

 NY will soon have bacon in a bottle (Courtesy Bakon) 

Meanwhile in Seattle, where pop culture iconography may bring to mind Frappucinos and flannel, the bacon trend has taken a notable leap forward with Bakon - a potato-based vodka infused with real bacon and spices. 

Sven Liden, along with friends Chris Marshall and Stefan Schachtell, began experimenting with the idea more than two years ago.

“My wife thought it was weird,” Liden said. “There were jars of vodka and bacon everywhere.”

While there was certainly trepidation, the worries began to fade once they found the right mix of ingredients. After settling on a peppery bacon, the men opted for a base spirit distilled from Idaho potatoes, which Liden describes as having “a nice round edge that complements the bacon.” They also added in pepper oils to deliver a more robust flavor.

The final recipe was bottled for a small test run. It sold out in a little more than two weeks.

A couple of years ago, someone may have mistaken these as drinks from Willy Wonka’s bar menu. For Liden, it’s just another sign of his product’s potential.

“Making this kind of feels like cheating in some ways,” said Liden, who prefers the Bakon Bloody Mary. “Psychologically, there’s a comfort element to bacon. The taste – the salty, the savory – it just mixes with and complements other foods so well.”

The Bakon team is working to ensure that it keeps up with demand locally, but is also focusing on a wider distribution. They plan to have bottles in Astor Wines & Spirits and Brooklyn’s Borisal Liquor & Wine soon.

On the eve of International Bacon Day, and as New Yorkers’ options for poured pork expand, Matt Timms of Greenpoint looks ahead with a smile.

The organizer behind the Bacon Takedown in Williamsburg last March and an upcoming sequel in Nashville, Timms knows just how far the trend can go.

“Bacon is huge,” he said. “You’ve seen merchandising grow over the past year or so – bacon Band-Aids, bacon-izing your Web site. It's always been a slow build on this.

Things tend to get fetishized in this day and age, and I can't think of anything more deserving.”

Timms, who built his reputation with a series of successful Chili Takedown events, said he was initially surprised by the public’s appetite for bacon.

“Of course I loved bacon, but I wasn’t aware of the trend,” he said. “It all happened so quickly. A line wrapped around the block for a bacon-themed Takedown? I mean that came out of left field for me. I didn't see that coming; that crystallized it for me.”

Although most agree there’s truth to the adage of “too much of a good thing,” Jimmy Carbone sees the spotlight as an opportunity.

“For centuries, people have been using bacon – it’s evolved with us,” said Carbone, who admits to always having a little bacon frying in a skillet. “As some point, people may say ‘I’m tired of bacon,’ but not right now. Let bacon be trendy. I’ll be happy.”

Sounds like the perfect toast for a bacon martini.

Please contact New York spirits examiner Dan Mazei at nycspirits@yahoo.com.