Iron Chef: Bacon

What happens when a group of foodie gathers together to celebrate (in my humble opinion) the most awesome ingredient of all ingredients??

There’s a group of foodies at Vox that gathers once in awhile and do these “Iron Chef” battles. For the summer 2009 battle, I was fortunate enough to be the judge and have the honor of picking the not-so-secret “secret ingredient”. I thought about doing a battle fennel at first, but since the opportunity to pick the battle doesn’t come very often, I had to go to one of my favorite things of all times: BACON.

Initially, I wanted bacon to be opened up to interpretation so that things like pork belly, prosciutto, and pancetta would make it’s way onto the judge’s table, but only Sam & Carol (who went with chinese pork belly) caught this. Even though I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to sample the wide variety of bacon in different applications that night, I was still overall very impressed by the dishes that was brought to the competition. At the end of the day, it was Sarah (with Sous Chef Matt) that took home the prize with their traditional korean bacon dish. (I’ll apologize that there’s no picture of this at the moment, I’m currently still trying to obtain a copy of the picture from somebody that night.)

Even though I was ineligible to compete in the competition, I didn’t think I could just sit back and get fed. So I decided to try to recreate the bacon dish that I had a month ago at Alinea. Alinea’s “Bacon, Butterscotch, Apple, Thyme” is one of those things that makes something magical by combining a few very familiar flavors. While having the Alinea cookbook helped, I couldn’t have done it without using a lifeline with help from Carol from AlineaAtHome (Thanks for your tip Carol!!). Here’re some pictures from the prep:

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