Bacon Lovers Unite: The Culinary Art of Picking Favorites
April 16, 2007
by Kate Robb
Culinary Institutes Columnist
There's something to be said for being a jack of all trades in the kitchen, but picking favorites is an advantage for chefs and conoisseurs alike--it allows you to learn a great deal about your food of choice and what to do with it. Chocolate enjoys this kind of popularity, as do wine and pizza, but you might be surprised by some other culinary specializations. Bacon, anyone?
The Beauty of Microscopic Tendencies
For those of us who grew up sympathizing with sweet Wilbur in Charlotte's Web, bacon might seem like an unlikely entry into a culinary career. And perhaps it is. But if you consider what you can learn from studying one food, you'll see that focusing on any one ingredient (be it bacon, blackberries, or basil) will help you understand the way the other ingredients interact together.
The Food We Love to Hate
In terms of your culinary career, there's only one problem with indulging your bacon obsession: your customers think they don't want to eat it. That's because most American have a love-hate relationship with bacon. We love the way it smells and tastes, even the way it feels in our mouths. In fact, most of us love everything about it--except what health experts tell about fat, sodium, and additives.
A Culinary Career is about Finessing the Flavor
So the key here is to find new ways to work it into your menu items and make people's mouths water without overloading them. There are tons of recipes that call for bacon, but there are also some good resources that focus exclusively on bacon. Consider, for example, the website The Bacon Show, which offers a new bacon recipe every day. Not only does it currently have 657 recipes (three of which include currants), but it has an index that has approximately 204 ingredients to search under within the list of recipes in case you should want to include taro root, puffin, or panch phora.
If you're coming to the culinary arts to find out what makes food taste so good, then remember that creativity in the kitchen is no different than creativity on the canvas. Follow your food obsession and see where you end up.
About the Author
Kate Robb is a foodie, cultural critic, and university professor.
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