Posted by Sharon Anderson
I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve had it with bacon. Let’s be clear: I love bacon as much as the next person. I just can’t understand the mass bacon worship cropping up in every restaurant, bar, and blog. I love waking up to the smell of it, but (sorry Denise) I don’t need an alarm clock to cook it at my bedside. I love eating it next to a mound of warm, syrupy French toast, but I’m not interested in turning my breakfast into a miniature, perishable Stonehenge.
I used it as the base for a Bolognese sauce last week because I couldn’t be bothered to go out and buy pancetta, and it tasted great. But, I’m not going to weave strips of it into serving cups, placemats, squiggly garnishes—or better yet, tiaras. And I am definitely not going to floss my teeth with it.
Like everyone else in the world, I love its unmistakably meaty, smoky, salty flavor. But I don’t want to infuse salt with it so that everything those little granules touch will taste like bacon.
The universe, or at least the culinary one, is obsessed with bacon lately. I may not be any kind of authority in the food world, but I am going to go out on a limb here and declare (or maybe just plead) that bacon is over. The fad has been played out to the most ridiculous of extremes, and now, I think, it’s time for something new. I'm way open to suggestion.
