Breakfast Beat: Bring on the Bacon
Celebrated like few other meats, bacon wows customers as the star of flavorful new breakfast dishes at operations across the board.
By Christine LaFave, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 11/14/2007
Mmm, bacon. Savory indulgence, year-round guilty pleasure, and recipe-booster extraordinaire with an almost cultlike consumer following—witness blogs such as Bacon Unwrapped and The Bacon Show (“One bacon recipe per day, every day, forever”). To help realize bacon’s full potential at breakfast, chefs and restaurant executives at a variety of operations are going far beyond tossing a couple of pieces on a plate with pancakes or tucking in a few nondescript slices into an English muffin sandwich. By using bacon as a starting point or the ultimate morning comfort ingredient, operators are turning the rich, smoky, salty wonder that is sliced pork belly into a value enhancer and customer enticer.
“I think Emeril [Lagasse] said it best when he said, ‘Pork fat rules,’” says Ric Scicchitano, vice president of food and beverage for Dallas-based Corner Bakery Cafe. “It’s such a craveable flavor … I think if you look at the culinary development we do, bacon just always seems to be somewhere.” The chain’s Smoked Bacon and Cheddar Panini with thick bacon is a weekday best seller, Scicchitano says. And although “applewood-smoked“ today ranks high on a list of hyphenated descriptors meant to indicate premium quality, Corner Bakery has been relying on applewood-smoked bacon for nearly 16 years, he adds.
“Whenever we design something, we try to take the right approach,” Scicchitano says. “We wanted [the panini] to have big flavor, big bite.” Thickly cut bacon stands up to grilled sourdough country bread and offers a mouthfeel that is complementary—not too crispy, not too chewy—to the sandwich’s scrambled eggs and sliced Cheddar. “[The bacon] eats with a little bit of softness but still has a bite,” he says. “You need to caramelize the sugar in the protein. Bacon needs a good crispy sear to it, but not too far.”
As other breakfast staples have moved into and out of the spotlight, bacon’s popularity hasn’t waned. In R&I’s 2007 Menu Census, bacon ranked second on a list of items operators consider to be among their top three sellers. “It’s got such broad appeal,” says Scicchitano. “At the end of the day, it’s one of our top-selling proteins.”
Carol Meehan, owner of Fiddler’s Hearth Public House in South Bend, Ind., sees a similarly enthusiastic reception to both American bacon and Irish rasher bacon, made from pork loin rather than pork belly. “I think it’s probably the salty flavor,” Meehan says. “Bacon makes so many things better.”
The Celtic restaurant, which serves breakfast all day, offers a Traditional Fry-Up Breakfast that includes Irish bangers, Irish rashers, black pudding and white pudding served with two eggs, beans, grilled mushrooms and broiled tomato. “It’ll carry you through all day long,” Meehan says. Sean’s Irish Mess, a concoction of two slices of bread, one breakfast meat, chips, beans, two eggs and curry sauce, gives patrons the chance to incorporate American bacon—a trusted, favorite ingredient, into a more-exotic menu choice.
“As far as I’m concerned, everything is better with bacon,” Meehan says. “It’s a familiar flavor that can really sell the dish.”
At Square One Dining in Los Angeles, a frittata with bacon, spinach, tomato and Cheddar cheese is a “safe” choice for diners who prefer a more classic morning meal, says Chef-owner Robert Lee. On a menu that emphasizes an upscale approach to breakfast and seasonal and farm-fresh ingredients, though, bacon doesn’t get the short shrift just because of its old-standby status. Patrons not interested in chorizo or garlic-lemon-thyme chicken sausage can rest assured that the bacon they order is a high-quality, applewood-smoked variety from Wisconsin.
“The bacon applies to the concept of our whole restaurant,” Lee says. “[There are] not a lot of preservatives in it; the taste is just pure.” To eliminate excess bacon fat and prevent burning the fat that remains, Square One slow-roasts bacon. “Cut it thick and cook it slowly,” says Lee, a veteran of New York City’s Spice Market.
Also, as is shown in the bacon frittata, Lee prefers to play off bacon’s richness with elements that have a more acidic profile—“just to cut through the fat a little,” he says. “It could be a sharp cheese, mustard, a little squeeze of lemon, tomatoes.” For sheer sweet-and-salty indulgence, diners can choose to have their buttermilk pancakes topped with bacon-enriched caramel sauce. “Once we put bacon on something, people tend to get it for the bacon,” Lee says.
The O’Pear Grenache Omelette has that attracting effect at T.C. Eggington’s in Mesa, Ariz. The omelet combines Bosc pear slices with melted Havarti cheese, bacon and sliced almonds, and uses the sweetness of the fruit to enhance smoky-sweet honey-cured bacon. “[Bacon] is one of those things that you really shouldn’t eat a lot of it but you really wish you could,” says Owner-operator Tom Coker. In the O’Pear Grenache, fruit and nuts lend an element of freshness that lets customers enjoy their bacon without having to opt for a standard meat-, eggs- and cheese platter.
Coker notes that using a good, flavorful bacon means little if the meat isn’t prepared correctly; he advocates use of the “dip test” when determining bacon’s doneness. Properly cooked bacon is “just firm enough [that] if you held it in your hand, on your finger, it would dip slowly,” he says. It isn’t flat as a board (often the result of using “paper-thin bacon”); nor is it “so limp that it just drops,” Coker adds.
Whatever flavor nuances it features and however it’s incorporated into a recipe, always-beloved bacon has the ability to win over customers who might otherwise be indifferent to a dish. Corner Bakery’s Scicchitano, for one, readily acknowledges bacon’s menu prowess. “It has so much flavor,” he says. “Bacon just brings it.”
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