The perfect strip of bacon.

People love bacon. This is a true thing. Some people love bacon too much. There’s this whole bacon mania thing that has been happening that has produced all kinds of ridiculousness, on the internet and off, and spawned t-shirts and bumper-stickers and not a few food items that kind of seem like bad ideas. Like Baconaise. Baconaise seems like a bad idea to me.

Then again I am a man who hates things. When something is a meme, it is generally cool. But when it has become a thing, and the New York Times is writing things about it, and people begin defining their identities based on something that is only a thing, then we have problems. Maybe I think you’re starting to look silly. Maybe I think you should get a hobby, possibly leave the house for events that aren’t bacon related.

It is easy to see why people like bacon. On a physical level we are programmed to desire fat, salt, and sugar. Most things we will crave until we have had enough, but on some evolutionary level these three things are so important to survival, and so hard to find in nature, that we basically crave them to excess, the evolutionary assumption being that we may not have it later, and anyway when no one lives past 30 who cares about heart conditions. Bacon has fat and salt in generous quantities, all wrapped around a nice protein core. Most cures nowadays also include some sugar as well, and pork is a relatively sweet meat, so bacon is quite literally addictive and delicious.

From a cultural standpoint people associate bacon with much more than a vehicle for fat, salt, and some sugar. We know bacon is bad for us, people have been saying so for years, and so it has become a glorious outlet, allowing people to behave badly and revel in excess. I enjoy excess as much as the next everyman. Unlike other mothods of excess, bacon has for some reason taken on a rebellious, populist aspect. Articles on the cultural implications of what has been called “Bacon Mania” talk about things like giving the “middle finger” to over-sanctimonious “vegans” and health nuts, something which is considered uniquely “American.” Somehow, by eating bacon we are showing them that we can’t be controlled. Yeah. And if some bacon is fun, lets have a whole fucking lot of bacon. That’ll show em. That’ll show all of them that we’re Americans, and if we wanna eat bacon while driving our SUVs and invading Iraq, we’re gonna!

And this is where I get pissed off.

I enjoy bacon. It is tasty. Saying it has wider cultural implications than any other kind of preserved meat is kind of ridiculous. Bacon is a way of preserving and serving an unattractive piece of meat, which happened to have been very popular in colonial and especially southern cooking due to the fact that you can literally feed pigs shit and they will survive. How did bacon become a symbol of being a pompous American douche bag? I understand that food is an important aspect of culture, but why must people become proselytizing ass-hats when someone eats in a different way from their own? Granted, no one is going around calling me a redneck when I order bacon at diners, but people do sometimes look at me funny if I order a tofu dish. What? I like tofu. Do we need to make a big deal out of this? It is food. You eat it. It doesn’t mean anything about my lifestyle other than I occasionally eat soy based products. Is your aversion to it based on anything other then media discussions of vegetarianism? Really?

I was raised kosher, but it was never my idea. My mother, who had converted, kept the house supplied with soy based pork substitutes, and we lived by the compromise, nonsensical rule of Americanized Jews that keeping kosher in the home is a strict necessity, but if you eat shrimp out at a restaurant then god doesn’t mind as much. That being said, bacon was not something I had gotten around to eating until comparatively late, maybe 10 or so. I remember vividly the entire experience. We were eating breakfast at a diner, I think it was the Colonial before their big reconstruction, back when the whole place smelled of cigarette smoke and the salad bar was in the middle of the dining room. I had only recently come to grips with the concept that food I had not tried before was not necessarily awful, and had begun trying a variety of unfamiliar things. As I perused the menu I asked mom what bacon was like. She reacted with shock.

“You’ve never tried bacon?”

“Nope. When would I?”

“oh right, I keep forgetting.”

“you forget we keep kosher?”

“well, I forget you were raised kosher.”

Dad looked somewhat nonplussed as I ordered the bacon. I entirely forget what I ordered it with, probably pancakes. I remember when it came I was suspicious. I hated fat in meat and would scrupulously pick off fatty layers. The bacon looked to be a total loss to me. Numerous stripes of fat taking up a huge percentage of the strip. I remember my parents looked somewhat bemused as I tried to cut off the fat from the bacon, finally giving up and picking up the leanest piece that I had been given and trying it.

You all know what bacon tastes like so I don’t need to describe it here at length. What is interesting about this memory, and this stands out very clearly for me, was that I thought

“oh man, this is amazing. It would be so much better if it were a little bit crunchier.”

In this instant I conceived, even if I did not articulate, the problem of the Platonic Ideal Form. We all hold in our minds the ideal form of objects with which we interact, such as chairs or cats or the people around us. These ideals are, depending on your view, stereotypes which we must constantly refine, or the true form of the thing described to which the things in our lives aspire. I would say the people in our lives exist more as stereotypes, as our minds aspire to hold on to the true form but ultimately fail. This is why people, even those we love and know well, can constantly surprise us, and also constantly chafe at the assumptions we make about them. But in objects, especially those we create, the true form, or at least the ideal form, is much more often something we hold in our minds than something we ever actually find. Those that appreciate food and music and art are, I suspect, those of us that are willing to pursue these ideals. How much we enjoy this pursuit has to do with how much of the ideal we are willing to see in the imperfect forms that surround us while still seeing them as imperfect.

If you ask most people to describe the ideal piece of bacon I think most people would say some variation of the following:

The ideal bacon is crispy. Most of the fat has been fried out so all that remains are the meat, which has been rendered crunchy, if a little chewy. Too chewy is bad. Too much crispy is burnt. Where that line is drawn is certainly up for debate, but most would want their bacon to be somewhat stiff, certainly not floppy. There will be some residual marbling from the fat striping, but overall there should be more meat than fat. The bacon will taste salty, a little sweet, and smoky.

If most of us have the same ideal of bacon, which I am pretty sure is true, why is there so much floppy, soggy bacon in the world? It is a balancing act to make good bacon, but one would assume that there is a market for bacon, and if there is a market there should be people who will learn the relatively simple seeming skills of frying bacon properly. And yet imperfect bacon abounds in our society. Most of the bacon we consume is probably in sandwich form, and I will guarantee that most sandwiches are made with microwave bacon. I don’t know how many of you have ever consumed this stuff straight, but it is very disappointing. It is sliced paper thin, is mostly fat, and is about as crunchy and stiff as wet toilet paper. Sure, it still tastes like bacon, and as such most of us are willing to savor its bacon-y goodness so long as we do not have to confront it directly, but it is honestly a far cry from the real thing.

I personally enjoy vegetarian bacon, but not as bacon. Vegetarian bacon is, for me, the culinary equivalent of a Godzilla movie. It is easy, strangely satisfying, and hilariously bad. When uncooked the “bacon” is floppy and soft. While still in the oil of the pan the same is true, but immediately upon leaving the pan it becomes a salty, somewhat smoky, bacon-colored cracker that bears zero textural resemblance to real bacon. I consume this for the same reason I consume “State” brand vodka and watch “Bruce Lee Strikes Back from the Grave”: pure self hate.

These vain facsimiles of the bacon experience, and I would include most bacon products and dishes in this category, while sometimes tasty, merely ice over the fact that most of us have never actually had that perfect strip of bacon. No matter how many bacon encrusted turkeys or scallops we eat, how many really good pieces of bacon have we had?

The bacon mania thing could have been a really good thing for the world if it had been a quest for the perfect strip of bacon. I have nothing but respect for those who quest for truth and beauty, whatever its form, and bacon mania could have been a quest based culture. I imagine T-shirts depicting Buddhist monks meditating over bacon, or restaurants renowned for the perfect bacon, open only on Wednesdays and only reachable by a footpath leading to the top of a mountain. Instead bacon mania became the culinary equivalent of the tea party movement: a group of people too satisfied with the way they have been doing things to realize no one is actually threatening them. We like eating meat. You tell us its bad, so we’re gonna eat the worst kind of meat we possibly can. That’ll show you. That has no honor. That’s childish gainsaying. That is a thing.

I had not been on a quest for truth or beauty, but I found it in Manhattan over the weekend when my way-hetero life-partner and I stopped into The Remedy Diner to get a snack. The place has a classic diner look, but is very Manhattan. Everyone inside looked like they had gotten specially dressed that morning in order to go there and the special on the sandwich board out front advertized a free mimosa with selected entrées. This being New York, they also have a full bar at the diner, which is weird and immoral, but not pertinent to the story.

I ordered the waffles and bacon, and the bacon came out on top of the waffle, with a sprinkling of powdered sugar. I was somewhat annoyed at the sugar. I like my bacon pure; I like to savor it. As soon as I picked it up my irritation had evaporated. The bacon was stiff as a board, but clearly was not burned. It was thick cut. It smelled wonderfully bacony. I looked at my girl Friday, whose fork hung in midair. Though a vegetarian, she appreciated the magnificence of what had transpired.

“That looks like some really amazing bacon, dude. That’s like perfect.”

I made a noise that was halfway between a whimper and a grunt. I completed the arc of the bacon from my plate to my face and bit in. It was perfect in every way. Thick and crunchy, but just a little chewy. Extremely lean, but with enough striping to let you know that the leanness was the product of excellent culinary technique, and not the residue of a special cut. I nearly wept. The universe seemed less cruel and random. Outside children played and did not fear. Somewhere a kitten attempted to climb out of a bucket.

The waffle was pretty good too. I would definitely recommend this restaurant. I don’t know if their bacon will be up to this standard again, or if it was a fluke. I almost don’t dare return. If it is not, I will feel disappointment. I will wonder if the perfection was manifest, or the result of some trick of psychology. I will wonder if there is even such a thing as perfect bacon. This is the nature of truth in our world: inevitably transitory and illusory. But the authenticity of the moment in which it occurs atones for many of the sins in everyday life, even things like bacon mania.

food courts i have loathed.

I hate malls. As someone with more than a passing interest in urban planning, malls are just a bad idea. As a liberal with a difficult relationship with market based economies, malls are downright evil. They represent the privatization of public space, a coarsening of commerce, and are poison to local businesses. Many of my memories of adolescence are of being dragged to malls in a vain attempt to get deals on clothing that i neither desired nor needed. As i have grown older I myself have been drawn into the quest for "deals," despite knowing full well that capitalism is made to screw you, and mall based capitalism aims to fuck you and then kill you.

within malls there is the institution of the food court. growing up the food court was the teddy bear the mall gave you to apologize for its repeated batteries, only to resume the beatings when you didn't show enough appreciation. after being dragged through innumerable identical clothing stores, peddling cloths that might have been hip in the 1970s, my only hope would come to be the thought of food. getting said food required tearing the adults in my life away from their orgy of consumerism with repeated lobbying. i would focus on my dad, inevitably the more disinterested of the adults in the situation.

"dad, im getting hungry"

"ok, we'll get food after this."

time would pass and the clothes would fly and i would be forced in and out of changing rooms, as my superiors quested for the clothing that, despite being made by a philipino sex slave based on the measurements of a plastic dummy in new york that bore only passing resemblance to a human, somehow would fit me just right, and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future even though i was still growing, hated the garment, and already had several that fit fine.

"dad, im really getting hungry."

"so am i" my sister would offer

"the kids are getting hungry"

"ok, i just wanted to get to a few more stores."

my previous low level anger at the situation would now blossom forth into full fledged rage. with the exception of my sister there was no one in a five mile radius i did not want to die horribly. the pop crap being piped into the store, sung by some blonde dipshit who hadn't even heard of music theory, began to sound like someone stapling glass. i liked to image that if i stared hard enough my eyes would turn into lasers and bore a hole through my victimizers.

if we were lucky my dad would intervene in these grand schemes of consumerish glory and we would get food first. then we would arrive at that grad feeding trough of america's unwashed masses, the food court.

they are basically all the same. the chinese restaurant, with some kind of cloyingly racist reference to stereotypes, such as "panda" or "wok," was my favorite destination. the thick, doughy noodles of the lo mein were very comforting, and helped recharge my batteries after all that rage. there is also the generic national fast food restaurant, and the inevitable sabarro. This latter chain has somehow managed to bring passable pizza to every food court and rest stop in the country, displacing the pizza huts and dominos for the past 20 years despite having no market penetration outside of these locales. there was also the inevitable cinna-bon, some kind of ice cream place, and maybe that cajun chain where everyone collects their free sample and never eats. i broke this rule once, in south station in boston, and ate at the cajun place. i regretted it, not because the food was bad, but because it was the same food as they had at the chinese place. why have two places, and why besmirch the good name of cajun cooking?

in recent years i have seen some encouraging changes in food courts, including the penetration of this market by independent restaurants, usually serving Mediterranean food. this might be something limited to my region, as new jersey is seeing an influx of middle eastern individuals. there has also been an influx of sushi places which, while not great, present some alternative to the usual pap. there has also been the advent of charlie's cheese steaks, which are bizarrely good, made fresh to order, and offer some great deals.

last week i found myself once again in a food court. my lady friend needed some shoes (no, really) and so we headed to the jackson outlets. this institution is one of the many outlet malls that have grown across the country, promising their customers another "good deal." factory outlets were an invention of the 80s, in which canny chains sold their slightly defective items at a discount. soon, chains realized that by cutting out the usual retail middleman at an outlet they could undercut their competition. by the late 90s outlets were so popular chains realized that simply by calling something an outlet theyr could do away with the pretext of any kind of discount, put some signs up talking about sales, and people would just assume they were getting a good deal. the jackson outlets are a far cry from the old outlet malls, which resembled nothing more than dollar stores, with boxes and merchandise spread across the land willy nilly by urgent-eyed overweight housewives clawing their way through stacks of boxes trying to find the right size or model.

while the waistline of the customers has remained, the jackson outlets are located in a very wealthy area, and they look it. the mall is actually a ring of stores surrounding a parking lot, attempting once again to replicate the homey feeling of the old downtowns they continue to destroy. the rule in these stores is high class, as the stores are polished and clean and the employees polite. the brands represented run something of a gamut, but a large large portion of them are upper crust brands like harvey and david and bose. nestled in a fold of the ring is the mall's food court, a polished affair encrusted in tvs blaring teen pop stars. the consumers of this cultural disaster are now afforded the ability to request the next music video by texting a selection of numbers to another number.

this is by far the worst food court i have even endured. despite a large space, the court offers its patrons a dizzying array of three food options: a subway that does not honor the current 5$ footlong promotion, a nathans, which is always overpriced, and a very affordable, very generic, Chinese restaurant which also offers sushi. given the alternatives, i chose the Chinese restaurant. though there may not have been any really good options here, this may have been an error. i have never seen vegetable lo mein screwed up before. there weren't really any vegetables in this vegetable lo mein. nor was it seasoned properly. since the only seasonings generally found on lo mein are vegetable oil and soy sauce, i mean that these were noodles bathed in nothing more than water, the barest hint of soy sauce, and some very very sad onions. the other items i was given with this meal were on the disappointing side of mediocre, but nothing will ever top the failure to properly prepare a mean as ridiculously simple as lo mein. fail. fail Fail FAIL!

ceeder seder

This was written two weeks ago but wasn’t ready for posting. I ended up getting to busy to do so, so you get it today. Yay.

Had a loverly seder last night, all the more fun for being thrown together at the last possible second.

Last February or November or something i made vegan matzo ball soup, partly for di but mainly because i like a culinary challenge. Unfortunately, I don't remember how i made them. I think i based my recipe on this one: http://www.theppk.com/recipes/dbrecipes/index.php?RecipeID=147 . The first trial was a relative success, but im not sure if i modified it. last night i tried it again and it was less successful, though i saved it with a tasty broth. there are a couple comments i have as plausible reasons for the dissolution of the balls. first, one hour in the fridge is probably not enough. second, I'm not overly convinced of the effectiveness of straight tofu as a binder. i think next time i will at least use one egg equivalent of vegan egg replacer, probably flax seed, just to be sure. finally, i used firm tofu. im not really sure how much a difference that makes, but things like matzo balls are all chemistry, and diversion from the recipe should be noted as a possible point of failure.

the broth, as i noted, was more successful. I hate most commercial vegetable broths, mainly because of the inclusion of tomato. this is especially odd as i love tomato soup. be that as it may, i am generally hesitant to use vegetable broth as the sole base of my soup. in this case, i had already opened a can for use in the matzo balls, so i figured i would use it, but resent it. should you be attempting this, you should note that i had used 1/2 cup of the broth in the matzo balls. someone who cares more about this can do the math and calculate how many cups of broth i used in this recipe.

I started with a small onion and one of the commercially available minced garlics. some people complain about these, but if they are preserved in water they don't have any adverse additives and contribute a lot of garlic flavor without having to spend days peeling garlic. i hate peeling garlic. they say you can just smash it, but i am far too Jewish to pull that kind of thing off.

i set the onion and garlic in a big soup pot with a decent amount of olive oil, maybe 3 or 4 tablespoons, and while the oil heated i cut in 3 or 4 large mushrooms. i cut the mushrooms in 4 so there would be nice bite-size chunks. if i were doing this as a straight soup i would have gone heavier on the mushrooms, but as the focus of this was to be on the matzo balls, i figured i should go a bit lighter. By this point the oil was getting pretty hot, so i added a little broth from the can just to cool things off. through the rest of this recipe it should be assumed that when you are not chopping you are stirring, at least until you start adding water. otherwise things burn. i then chopped in two good handfuls of baby carrots, just cutting them in half so they would be of a good mouth size.

a key thing that many do not realize is that the reason chicken broth is so tasty isnt the chicken. it is the celery. to this end i cut in a few good shakes of celery salt, and then stripped the leaves off of three or four celery stalks, such that i had a good handfull of leaves before i chopped them. its important to check that the leaves aren't rotting, and then give them a good rinse. it is ok if some of the smaller branches get involved. all are welcome. cutting leaves is probably the most fun i ever have with a knife. i just get a big ol knife and go nuts. when they were reasonably decomposed by the cutting, i threw the leaves into the oil and then added a bit more broth. a generous amount of dill at this point is quite tasty.

this is basically it. keep stirring and adding broth a little at a time for five minutes or so, just letting the stock reduce between adding the broth. when you are out of broth, you have basically done enough. turn up the heat to high, and start adding cans of water. the vegan matzo ball recipe calls for 8 cups, so i added 8 cans.

having made my vegan matzo ball soup, i set about cooking meat. i had found a lamb shank at the grocery store, which i was quite pleased about. this wasnt going to be the focus of the meal, though, so i didnt put too much thought into this. i stuck the shank into a ziplock bag, added some shiraz red wine, franks red hot, and some worcestershire sauce, and topped it up with water. this was kind of uninspiring, but i think i watered it down too much, and it was only marinating for 20 minutes or so.

the main thing was to be chicken, that most traditional jewish meat. unfortunately our chicken was mostly frozen. i used the defrost setting on the microwave to get it to the point where i could get a knife in it, and took it down to pieces, then continued nuking the pieces until it was relatively defrosted. if there was one point where this meal could have failed it was here. pieces of the chicken got singed in the microwave, which is gross, and other pieces remained frozen. on the other hand, tearing down chickens is kind of a lot of fun. one of the parables of zen tells the story of a butcher who told the king he had never needed a new knife in 30 years. the secret, he said, was to cut in the spaces between the bones, working with nature to take apart the animal naturally and respectfully. the king, of course, was impressed, and sent his executioner to learn at the feet of this master.

no one ever said the powerful understand the proper lessons.

anyway, taking apart a chicken is a zen experience for me. keeping in mind the parable, i focus on the chicken, on what holds it together, and what makes it itself.

once the chicken was somewhat usable, i sprayed pam into a glass casserole, and put the chicken in, skin side up, onto the bottom of the pan. i discovered some sectns of brest had lost skin, and i covered these with the wings. i then gave the chicken a coating of salt and pepper, a few dashes of franks per peice, and a dusting of grahm masala.

sweet potatoes are an integral part of a seder, mainly because there are no other starches you can eat, save matzo. We didn't have any marshmallows, however, and i definitely didnt have time to do the full fledged mashed sweet potatoes thing. i sliced three potatoes into thin discs, but really just hacked them as small as i could quickly. then i thre more garlic into the bottom of a pan, added two of the three potatoes, added some dolups of smart balance, then added the third potato.

once the potatoes were done, i threw the lamb shank into a pamed pan, and put all three into the oven at 350. they were probably in there around and hour? im not sure, i just kept checking till the chicken was done. as it turned out, the chicken came out wonderfully. i dont know if it was the slightly frozen nature, or the fact that they were somewhat thick on the bottom of the pan, but they came out very juicy in the middle, with nicely crispy skin.

during the actual meal we ended up discussing the strange traditions that had developed in the Seder specifically, and in religious observance in general, around post Colombian contact plant items. for instance, the insistence on dogwood in easter celebrations. I don't know if dogwood is a pre or post contact flora in europe, but i doubt greatly that any kind of cross made in the middle east would have been made of a northern species like dogwood. more to the point, how authentic are the apples in the charoset? apples were an old world fauna, but there has been five thousand years of domesticated genetic manipulation, which was heavily accelerated in the new world.

at any rate, my charoset was very simple. the only walnuts i had were preserved in honey, so i used one apple, a quarter cup of honey walnuts, a quarter cup of almonds, and three tablespoons of shiraz wine. tasty.

The meal itself was somewhat rushed but lovely overall, lubricated with ample amounts of shiraz, my favorite wine. The matzo balls was something of a glorious disaster. As I mentioned, the balls dissolved. When I have read about matzo ball failures, people have talked of thick gelatinous masses. This wasn’t really what happened. Instead it was akin to an oatmeal, with the matzo meal serving to thicken the vegetable broth resulting in a delightfully savory and nutritious soup.