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.