Marie Rama's Blog, page 11
August 31, 2013
August 30, 2013
Bacon with a Side of Ford Fiesta
Ford Fiesta is hamming it up, selling strips of bacon as customized decals. What took so long for this idea to come true?! With co-author Peter Kaminsky holding a plate of Chocolate Peanut Bacon Toffee and leaning against the bacon-wrapped Ford Fiesta. Afterward the shot was taken, we sat down to eat a BLT with Benton’s bacon at Brooklyn’s Prime Meats. Being The Bacon Lady is a tough job!
August 28, 2013
Steps to Making Perfect Chocolate Peanut Bacon Toffee
At 11:30 tomorrow, staged in front of Brooklyn’s Prime Meats, my co-author Peter Kaminsky and I will meet for a photo shoot that features the first ever bacon-wrapped car. Ford Motor Company is apparently hoping (they must have researched this!) that Fiesta buyers will buy bacon-strip decals to customize their cute and sporty car.
I hope they sell a million of ‘em, and I’ll wager most of the buyers will be young guys. I’d personally like to invent or invest in the production of a car air freshener that smells like bacon, so I can hang it in my car as it always smells like my son’s dog Abbey after she’s visited the creek in our back yard.
Anyways, it should be fun and I’ll post some shots when I have them tomorrow. I’m taking along a batch of Bacon Nation’s Chocolate Peanut Bacon Toffee, and I took some pictures this afternoon of the process to help you make your own — perfectly.
But before we get to the pictures, the first thing you must absolutely do is to measure and then set all the ingredients and your utensils out on your counter, mis en place. One you start cooking, you can’t leave the stove for even a minute, so get organized! You’ll find the complete recipe in Bacon Nation, but here are a few cooking tips and pictures you won’t find in the book.
Perfect Chocolate Peanut Bacon Toffee
Mix the peanuts and the cooked bacon in a medium bowl and set it aside before you start cooking the butter-sugar mixture. The Bacon Nation recipe calls only for lightly salted cocktail peanuts, but today I used a combination of those and chopped pecans. Almonds would also work nicely, so feel free to experiment. The recipe in the book calls for 5 slices of bacon, chopped and then lightly browned and drained. But you can increase that by one more slice to 6 in all, if you like, for a little more of that rich bacony flavor.
Buy a good dark chocolate that’s at least 70% cacao. I like Lindt for its richness. Then chop 4 ounces of it finely so it melts quickly when you sprinkle it over the hot bacon-peanut toffee mixture.
You are literally making a candy and you’ll need to hang a candy thermometer over the side of the heavy-bottom skillet and into the pot. At an initial heating stage, the butter-sugar mixture looks very pale like this:
As you cook and whisk the mixture over medium heat and the temperature rises, the mixture starts to caramelize and brown, like the picture below. Be patient, keep stirring. You’re making candy! And it’s really cool to watch the temperature on the thermometer rise and then reach its final stage of 300 degrees F.
When it’s finally reached 300 degrees F (after about 10 minutes or so), the mixture will be a dark caramelized brown and will smell ever so slightly burnt. Take it off the heat immediately and use a wooden spoon to stir in the bacon-nut mixture. Work quickly, but be very careful and don’t touch the candy: yikes, it’s hot!
Spread the mixture about 1/4-inch thick, onto the large, lightly buttered baking sheet (that you buttered before you began cooking!) Sprinkle over the chopped chocolate and the remaining reserved nuts and bacon.
Then set the pan into your freezer for about 30 minutes or until it’s completely firmed up. Take a metal spatula and run it under the toffee in the pan, breaking it up into pieces of any desired size.
This delicious candy can be stored in an airtight container in the freezer for up to six months. I so love breaking off a piece and having it with a lovely cup of tea. My personal treat after a long day.
August 27, 2013
You Can't Buy This Chocolate Peanut Bacon Toffee
Our Chocolate Peanut BaconToffee in Bacon Nation never fails to win me friends when I make and serve it.
Here it is, topped with a candied slice of thick, hickory-smoked bacon.
August 20th, while signing books at the Central Market in Plano Texas, I enticed shoppers with a little piece of my bacon toffee before giving them the hard sell and all the good reasons they should buy my book, Bacon Nation. It was the hour just after work when people typically stop into Central Market to grab something quick and easy for dinner. Central Market is one of the most impressive supermarkets I’ve ever visited. The organic produce section is huge and their meat case carries an interesting assortment of locally produced hard-worked smoked bacons.
People picked up a piece of the toffee, tasted it, and then over and again asked me where to buy it.
"No where. You can only make it, and the recipe’s in the book," I said.
Sold quite a few copies of Bacon Nation that night, but could have sold many more bundles of Chocolate Peanut Bacon Toffee, if I’d had it to sell.
I suspect that adding bacon, a meat, to a candy, would mean you’d need to add preservatives to prolong its shelf life. That would certainly change the flavor and is probably the reason some inventive food entrepreneur hasn’t already brought really good, bacon-laced products (i.e. crackers, cookies, candies, etc.) to market.
So, if you want to enjoy this candy, you’ll just have to buy the book and make the recipe yourself. Chocolate Peanut Bacon Toffee is one of those wonderful things money can’t buy.
August 20, 2013
mamanerdy:
Whiskey, Caramel, Marshmallow and Bacon...
Whiskey, Caramel, Marshmallow and Bacon Bark
Haven’t tried this recipe, but how can you miss with whiskey, bacon, marshmallows and caramel!
August 14, 2013
Summer BBQ Festival Promises Bacon Nation, Smoky Goodness and Blues
For a great end of summer bash with outstanding barbecue and blues head over to the Illinois Glen Ellyn BBQ festival; http://www.glenellynbackyardbbq.com/Home.php. But it you can’t go, buy a raffle ticket for chance to win a copy of Bacon Nation, reviewed in The New York Times as a bacon “manifesto.”
August 7, 2013
Join me at Ramekins in San Francisco
Come cook with me in San Francisco September 12th at Ramekins! https://www.ramekins.com/event-registration/?regevent_action=register&event_id=84
July 22, 2013
Touring Atlanta, Tampa and Jacksonville with Warm Shrimp Salad with Bacon
I’m heading off to Atlanta, Georgia tomorrow and then to Tampa and Jacksonville, Florida to demo Bacon Nation recipes and talk with folks about the ways bacon, with its salty, smoky, sweet, meaty, fatty favors can make just about any dish taste better.
One of the TV segment dishes will be Bacon Nation’s Warm Shrimp Salad and I snapped this photo of many of the ingredients needed to make the dish — bacon, lemon zest, shrimp, red wine vinegar, red peppers, bacon fat and extra virgin olive oil, garlic, spinach, red onion.
The most difficult aspect of a TV cooking demo, if you ask me, is packing all the information about the recipe and cooking tips into 3 or 4 very brief TV minutes. The four-day media tour is packed with TV and radio interviews and with opportunities to speak with great food editors. I end each day of the tour at a Publix Super Market, instructing a class of 40 to 50 students. I pray I have the strength to keep talking!!!
By the way, a carpenter’s rasp like this one is my very favorite tool for zesting lemon peel finely. Try it!
July 14, 2013
July 8, 2013
DIVINE SUMMER FRUIT TART
A summer pie is wonderful, but a fruit tart is even better. First off, every bite in a tart offers up more fruit and less crust – a positive for our waistlines. Second, you need much less sugar, so the flavor of the fruit and not the sugar prevails. Third, the sweetened tart crust is more like a tasty cookie dough than a traditional pie crust. And because you’re going for a rustic, free-form look in a tart, you don’t need to fuss much to shape the dough just right. Finally, there’s such a “wow” moment when you bring it to the table slightly warm with summer fruits nestled into the tart crust, shining like little jewels.
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling dough
5 tablespoons sugar, divided
½ teaspoon salt
Grated peel of 1 lemon, divided
10 tablespoons cold butter
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons cold water, or more as necessary
2-1/2 to 3 pounds ripe but still firm fruit, such as peaches, nectarines, plums
¼ teaspoon cinnamon or to taste
¼ cup coarsely chopped almonds
1 pint vanilla or rum-raisin ice cream
1. Combine the flour, 3 tablespoons of the sugar, salt, and half of the lemon peel in a bowl. Dice the cold butter and using a pastry blender or two knives, cut the butter into the flour to make a crumbly mixture. (Or, combine the same ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the mixture is crumbly.) Beat the egg yolk with 3 tablespoons of the cold water and dribble it over the flour mixture. Stir with a fork or pulse in the food processor until the mixture starts to come together into a dough. (If necessary add more water, a tablespoon at a time.) Gather the dough into a ball and set it in a bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate while preparing the fruit.
2.) Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
3.) Peel the peaches. Cut each fruit in half and remove the pit. Then cut each fruit into ½-inch thick slices. Transfer the sliced fruit to a medium mixing bowl and sprinkle with the cinnamon.
4.) Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface into a loosely shaped ¼-inch-thick oval. Using the rolling pin, transfer the dough to a shallow rimmed baking sheet or pan, about 15 by 11-inches. Except in the corners, the oval nearly covers the baking sheet, as shown here. If you don’t have this exact size baking sheet, you can use another as long as it’s big enough to accommodate the oval.
5.) Arrange the fruit in rows on the dough, leaving about a ½-inch border of dough around the tart’s edge. Fold or pinch the outer edge of dough into the fruit, which makes a little wall to trap juices and prevent them from spilling onto the cookie sheet while the tart bakes. Sprinkle the fruit with the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar, the remaining lemon peel, and the coarsely chopped almonds.
Recipe Tip: You can sprinkle a little more sugar or even brush the top of the fruit lightly with warmed raspberry jam, if the fruit is not sufficiently sweet.
Bake about 30 to 40 minutes or until the edges of the tart have lightly browned and the fruit is tender when pierced with a knife but still holds its shape. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature, with vanilla or rum raisin ice cream.
Yield: 8 servings
