Several posts back we cured our own bacon and encouraged you to do the same. This post is a little different and much simpler.
Let’s assume you see some thick sliced bacon on sale – really good quality product that happened to miss the eye of a bunch of bargain shoppers so is now high dollar, thick sliced bacon at a bargain price. It’s been marked down so the store can sell it before the cut off date.
We were meandering through the mega-mart looking for pork butt the other day and noticed just such an item. We purchased a 1.5 lb package at half the normal price and were excited to try a bacon lover experiment.
As soon as we arrived home we laid the bacon strips out on a parchment lined sheet tray. These can be overlaid and placed very closely together as the bacon will shrink a bit. Next we sprinkled a moderate coating of our chipotle smoked pepper powder over the bacon strips. Black pepper bacon is all the rage now so we had a good idea this would be an even better flavor profile. Enter the oven at 300-350 degrees for 10-15 minutes depending on your particular cooking vessel.
Flip at the 8 minute mark and move around if needed for even cooking. At this point you’ll know how long it needs to continue.
When finished, we used 4 slices for BLT’s for the two of us and put the remainder in the freezer for the future. Unfortunately, the taste was so absolutely delicious we could have finished the rest of it off without question had we not had any culinary discipline…
It was that good. The added fat of thick cut combined with caramelized bacon meat and then a bit of heat from the smoked chipotle powder. It was a perfectly balanced, intense flavor.