Bacon

I got up at 6:00 this morning, made myself a nice cup of Gevalia coffee… and started frying up some bacon.

Matt Blum of the Geek Dad blog, had a post about his recent experience making bacon pancakes and, since I’m a bacon aficionado, I thought I’d give it a try. My daughter was game, too, but we had to leave for a horse show at 7:45, so I had no choice but to get started early… on a Saturday, no less!

So I fried up a pound of brown sugar cured bacon. We didn’t eat the whole pound, but hey… I opened the package, so it might as well get cooked, huh? …there are worse things…

Having filled the kitchen with the spectacular aroma of bacony goodness, I went to work on the pancake batter. I will admit that I skimped on this part, as I used some Crusteaz pancake mix. Matt Blum made his from scratch and I will acknowledge his batter superiority, but hey… I was on a timeline here. I did, however, add a bit of the bacon grease to the batter for some extra flavor.

All that was left to do was griddle me up some pancakes! Taking Matt’s advice, and taking into consideration the ease of griddle cake flipping, I decided to tear a piece of bacon in half for each pancake instead of making a long, bacon-shaped pancake. It worked fairly well. I did three combinations.

1. Batter then bacon then more batter on top of the bacon
2. Bacon directly on the griddle topped with batter
3. At Megan’s suggestion, the inverse of the first version – Bacon on the griddle, topped with batter, topped with more bacon. (!!!)

Here is version #2 about to come off the griddle.

Megan got the first batch of two pancakes. She ate both of those and a small part of a third. I ate four of the #2 version. Nobody ate the one pancake that was version #3. We were both way too stuffed at that point.

Of course, pancakes aren’t complete without butter (real butter) and maple syrup (real maple syrup). Yes, Yes. I know there was already bacon in the pancakes and bacon grease in the batter (we added more for the second batch, by the way, because the batter didn’t have enough of a bacony flavor), but that doesn’t preclude adding butter. It’s a different category of fat. Now move along.

In retrospect, I think that they would be easier to eat if the bacon were cut into smaller pieces… perhaps squares. A more even distribution of bacon within the pancake would be a definite enhancement. That said, they were still awesome. Megan gave them a thumbs up.

After eating four of the pancakes, it was a long time before I was ready for lunch.

…and there is some bacon left over. Hmmm…