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Doug's Domain

Douglas J. Peckenpaugh is community director of content and culinary editor of Food Product Design. His career has centered on food and agricultural publishing, working as a writer, editor and publisher of magazines, books and websites. He also worked as a cook and restaurant manager while earning his B.A. in Professional and Creative Writing from Purdue University.

Doubling Down for BaconFest

April 14, 2010 Comments

Posted in Blog, Chefs, Chicken, Culinary, Foodservice, Market Trends, Meat Products, Pork, Meat Applications, Pig, QSR, Restaurant, Smoking / Smoke Flavors, Taste

My hog-butchering corner of our global farm (as Sandburg so eloquently once said) has been all about bacon of late, mainly due to what has been dubbed the first-ever international bacon festival (despite the fact that many cities have organized similar events…) and known to Chicago’s masses as BaconFest. This hardwood-smoked, deliciously fatty gathering—privy to the lucky 600 who snatched up the available tickets in 15 minutes flat (I inquired about a press pass to no avail—not even a response—perhaps they were more open to consumer press outlets like the Chicago Tribune, which ran a bit on the fest today…). Rumor has it that BaconFest will grow larger next year (how could it not?...), so maybe I’ll get a firsthand look at the second annual gathering of Windy City’s (and beyond) baco-maniacs.

And then there’s the new massively buzzed KFC Double Down (which SlashFood just sampled … I’m aiming to snag one sometime this week if I can restrain myself from indulging in any and every mole poblano sauce in my foodservice neighborhood … can’t get enough of the stuff … I wonder if anyone makes it with bacon?...), which IMO is getting way more criticism than it deserves. I mean, who criticizes fast food? Where do we live? Stalinist Russia? Well-rounded, purely democratic variety is the key to success, and if a chicken-for-bread bacon and cheese sandwich finds appeal, so be it. Just try to not eat it every day, folks… (Otherwise you might find some empty-coffer, nanny-state politician banging on your door demanding “sin” tax payoffs and ultra-discriminatory, fretfully scrambling health-care providers upping the insurance premiums…)

In a world that’s increasingly nit-picky about what people eat, bacon is a wonderful respite … a delightful, simultaneously savory, smoky, fatty, salty treat that clearly can accent a huge range of foods, as the baco-fanatics have proven. And bacon fits nicely into the overall smoking trend I’ve been noticing of late, which I mentioned a few days go in these virtual pages.

Embrace bacon, folks. It’s just that good.