Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, it’s a book about bacon. The salty, streaky breakfast favourite that most of us adore.
But we weren’t expecting a constant parade of people stopping in their tracks as they passed by the SBS Food desks and exclaiming. Some liked it, some didn’t, and some just sighed wistfully. This little book totally divided the office.
“I can feel my arteries hardening as I look at it,” said one, after spying The Little Bacon Cookbook.
“A whole book on bacon?” said another. “That’s a lot of bacon… I do like bacon, though, being a Brit.”
“I miss bacon,” sighed a colleague who’s been pescatarian for a year, and hasn’t eaten pig for more than 18 months.
“Aha, a bacon cookbook! That reminds me of The Bachelor and the bunch of roses made of bacon,” said yet another visitor.
The little tome tackles bacon in all its guises, from snacks (think bacon popcorn, super-crispy candied bacon and a cheesy bacon and mushroom dip) to sides (including bacon, beer and rosemary jam), meals, drinks and desserts (including a bacon-topped take on the insane monster shake over-the-top ridiculousness).
There’s bacon in thing and on things, and things wrapped in bacon. There’s bacon for breakfast – a breakfast “salad” (fairly token lettuce! But interesting home-made potato nuggets); slow-cooked bacon & beans; and a hangover-friendly bacon hash. Bacon for dinner – burgers, meatloaf, the temptingly titled “oozy bacon mac & cheese”. And anytime bacon: bacon & egg lasagne, which the book declares is “equally awesome eaten at any time of day or night”.
“A bacon bookbook. Oh my god. This could be my kids’ seven-day diet,” said one Dad who stopped for a look. “The good thing about bacon,” he mused,”is that it gets them to eat other food. It’s the one ingredient that will make them eat other things. You could wrap Brussels sprouts in bacon and they’d go for it.”
No bacon-wrapped sprouts in the book, but there are bacon-wrapped mac & cheese burgers and bacon-wrapped sweet potato.
And a surprising number of representatives of where bacon and sweet stuff intersect: bacon-bourbon ice-cream soda, bacon and peanut brittle ice-cream, dark chocolate-covered candied bacon with hundreds and thousands sprinkles (also used to top that monster shake), fudgy choc-caramel bacon cookies cinnamon-spiced bacon monkey bread, and more.
“Oooh I like this book… I want those brownies,” was a comment made by several folk. So yes, by “and more”, we mean there are bacon brownies. Rich, smokey, nut-studded brownies.
Source: Billy Law
Of course there are.
Images and recipes from The Little Bacon Cookbook by Jack Campbell (Smith Street Books, $29.99, hbk).
Cook the book
Source: Smith Street Books
Source: Smith Street Books
Source: Billy Law
Yes, we have a recipe for candied bacon brownies. Source: Smith Street Books
