Bacon Anti-Patterns
In my years of life, I have seen many goofy, silly, wacky and zany occurrences. And among those, I have seen goofy, silly, wacky and zany cooking preferences: People making snickerdoodle cookies by putting some cinnamon on sugar cookies. Alfredo sauce with elbow pasta. Oatmeal made with water.
But my brother’s method for making(macon) bacon takes the cake for the most atrocious thing I bear witness to on a non-insignificant basis. You wouldn’t believe this stuff:
Horrendous thawing technique
The standard practice that you’d expect would be to freeze, store, and thaw bacon for cooking would be as follows in a just world:
- Place bacon container in freezer. (We keep our bacon in the same plastic container pouch thing it came in)
- Remove bacon container from freezer when desired.
- Here’s a fork in the road: You can leave it in the fridge if you know you’ll be cooking it later later, or you can leave it out. (preferably on some napkins to capture the melt)
- Once bacon has reached an adequate temperature for cooking, remove bacon from plastic container pouch thing and initiate the cooking process.
But that’s how things would be in a just world. In the world we live in, the world my brother is in, the process remains the same until step 2, where things massively diverge from what you’d expect:
- Remove bacon container from freezer at around 8-9PM.
- Fill container B with hot water and place bacon pouch in container B.
- Go to sleep, awake at 7AM, remove the incredibly thawed bacon from its casings, and initiate the cooking process.
Take a moment to acknowledge some flaws here. You may be thinking “Oh, he thaws it in water for a long time. What’s the big deal?” And my dear individual, the big deal is that he sticks it in the water regardless of the state of the plastic pouch. In our household we don’t just make a bunch of bacon at once, so the unused bacon goes back in the plastic container pouch (and then in another bag to avoid contamination or something.) Then we repeat the process for bacon formation whenever some is desired. This is the way. No flaws.
At least, there wouldn’t be, if all was right in the world. He takes the bacon pouch out of the external bag for maximum heat transfer (or something) and leaves the pouch in the water. The pouch is usually open! That bacon is SOAKING IN WATER FOR 10+ HOURS. CRIMINAL. (and probably unsanitary)
There’s no correcting him. I’ve tried, and was reprimanded for not letting him do things “his own way.” Oh well. That’s that. To be repulsed in silence.
My further issues with what he does is how he cooks it.
The commonly agreed upon standard (my standard) is to make it in the oven, in large batches at some random temp between 350-425F (people can’t agree for some reason. I do 400F for 20 minutes and check frequently.) for optimal crisp, flavor, texture, alldat.
He microwaves his. That, I actually don’t really have a problem with. To each his own. Can’t deny the speed of the microwave. But man, I wish bacon macon was a task specifically relegated to me and only me. I’d be happy to do it for him.