Bacon Toffee?
Photo by Melissa Schneider.
Let me say right now that bacon toffee is not some new Derrick weirdness. Toponia Miller, co-owner of Fatted Calf, thinks it dates back at least to the 1970s. If that's true, we food lovers need to rescue this retro snack from oblivion. We've repopulated heritage turkeys and polished the passé from fondue; we can bring this candy back from the brink.
We can and we should. The unusual combination contrasts butterscotch sweetness with smoky saltiness and chewy texture with tooth-shattering caramel. It is a piece of heaven.
If you read The Ethicurean, you probably saw Bonnie's rhapsodic post about this same topic. Our convergence is no coincidence: She and I attended the same party. At an event overflowing with palate-popping delicacies, from paella-stuffed squid to olive-brine pickled eggs, the bacon toffee might have snagged more comments and satisfied lip-smacking than any other dish.
Doralice of Healdsburg's Cheese Shop, who brought the toffee but skedaddled before we descended on it, posted a full recipe in the comments on Bonnie's post. You could just follow that recipe, but where's the fun in that? I wanted to play with the idea and try to improve it. Toponia said that she once had a version with cayenne mixed in to the toffee, and it's not hard to spring from that flavoring to other spices such as pepper, allspice, or cloves.
But I had a different idea. Foreign Cinema offers a brunch item of bacon cooked in brown sugar, and the combination inspired me to swap brown sugar for white in the toffee recipe. I hoped the molasses in the brown sugar would add complexity to the candy.
And if I could change the sugar, why not fiddle with the fat? Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking explains that the milk solids in the butter provide the toffee taste, but the fat controls the texture. I interpreted that to mean that you can change one fat for another, but you sacrifice some of the typical flavor. I decided that 1Tb bacon grease mixed in with 7 Tb of butter would carry a subtle porky quality throughout the candy, not just in the bacon bits.
The results were not as dramatic as I expected. Melissa preferred the normal recipe to my pimped-out version because the light toffee and dark bacon made a sharper contrast to the eyes and tongue. My darker toffee had a more homogenous earthy flavor.
When she suggested that I add the brown sugar at the end, as a mix-in, I realized that I had used the brown sugar for the molasses character, and I could cut out the middle man by squirting molasses over the top of the sticky mass after I poured it onto the Silpat. This did add a subtle smokiness and the bacon-toffee contrast remained intact. Our friend meriko suggested crisping the bacon in brown sugar and adding that combination to the toffee, a variant I'll try soon.
I don't know what I would serve with this candy. A good stout came to mind, but I wonder if a Tokaji Aszú or Madeira would work, if you wanted to stay with wine.
Basic Toffee Technique (should scale well)
I use the proportions I learned in a candy-making class, but any good toffee recipe will work. And that sticky pot may look impossible to clean, so here's a tip: Fill the pot with water, and boil it until the caramel is all melted.
Do your mise en place. For normal toffee, break up nuts or chocolate chunks. For bacon toffee, crisp 5 pieces of bacon, drain on a paper-towel-lined plate, and chop into small squares; put molasses into a squirt bottle. Line a baking sheet with a Silpat liner.
Combine 1 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup water, a pinch of salt, and 4 oz (1 stick) butter. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring often. You don't need to worry about in-the-pot crystallization, because the butter's fat will introduce flaws that prevent the quick-as-a-blink switch from liquid to solid that sneaks up on the casual sugar cook. Continue to stir until the mixture reaches a temperature of 285°. Take off heat, stir in mix-ins, and pour onto the lined baking sheet. Spread the mixture quickly until it's about 1/4 in. thick all around. Squirt molasses over top in a decorative pattern. Set aside to cool for 2 hours.
Fold a paper towel into quarters and place it on a part of the toffee blob. Rap lightly with a hammer. Repeat at other parts of the toffee. You should see cracks forming throughout the candy. Run a spatula under the candy, and it should break apart into shards. Store the fragments in an airtight container at room temperature.
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