Cooking Lesson #1092: Benton’s Bacon Old Fashioned Cocktail

…from the Perspectives’ Happy Hour Bar

How you doin’? What if we added bacon to a cocktail? That may not seem groundbreaking, but in 2007, it was practically a revolution.
 
To be clear, bacon had been added to cocktails before. Any bartender can (and indeed, many have) put a cold piece of bacon in a Bloody Mary to get weird and soggy at the bottom of the drink, or balanced a piece of bacon on the rim of an Old Fashioned to leave gross oily splotches on the glass, but the Benton’s Bacon Old Fashioned is a difference of kind. It is clean, precise and scientific, a technical revolution as much as a flavor one. There is nothing quite like Benton bacon.
 
The pioneering insight was not to add the bacon, but to remove it. Everyone loves bacon, after all, but absolutely no one wants shiny slicks of fat congealing at the top of their drink. But how to remove the fat? Oil is famously difficult to remove from water, as you know, but what about alcohol? As it turns out, it would take a couple of chefs, borrowing from a long line of perfumers to come across the answer, which is something bartenders around the globe now know as “fat washing.”
 
Alcohol, as you may already know from the bottle of vodka in the freezer, has a radically depressed freezing point—an 80-proof spirit has a freezing point less than -10°F, or about 40 degrees lower than water and some 110 degrees lower than animal fat. What that means is if you want to remove fat from alcohol, just place it in the freezer: Everything that’s not alcohol (the fat) will freeze, making it really easy to remove with a coffee filter, and giving you a deeply flavored infusion with none of the actual fat.
 
Back to 2007—Don Lee was working at PDT in the East Village, and frequenting Momofuku Noodle Bar, where he had one of the best bites of bacon he’d ever experienced, a slow-cured, hickory-smoked product from Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams out of Madisonville, TN. He got some of the extra bacon fat from the restaurant just to cook with on his own, but after hearing about the fat-washing technique from the chefs at the visionary restaurant, he decided to give it a go with the bacon fat into bourbon. Inspired by breakfast, he gave it the Old Fashioned treatment, a kiss of sweetness with maple syrup and an orange peel and spiced it with Angostura Bitters. It was an immediate hit.
 
Looking back, what’s amazing about the Benton’s Old Fashioned is the amount of restraint at play. Imagine discovering fat washing! If it were me, I feel like I’d have cranked up the infusion, extracting maximum flavor out of the bacon and blowing everyone’s minds.
 
Ingredients 
2 ounces bacon-infused bourbon*
1/4 ounce real grade B maple syrup
2-3 dashes Angostura Bitters
1 large piece of orange peel, garnish
 
Directions

1. Add a large chunk of ice to a rocks glass.
2. Add the bourbon, maple syrup, bitters and stir for about 10 seconds.
3. Express the oils of an orange peel over the top and place the peel in the drink as a garnish.

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ChefSecret: This is how to make *Bacon-infused Bourbon
 
Ingredients
8 ounces of good American bourbon
1/2 ounce Benton bacon fat (find it here)
 
Directions
Put two or three strips of Benton bacon in a pan, and heat gently and slowly—you’ll want to make extra sure not to scorch or smoke the fat. When the bacon is almost cooked, pour off the liquid rendered fat into a separate container.
 
You need 0.5 oz. (1 tbsp) of fat for every 8 oz. of bourbon, so start with that ratio and scale up if you desire. Combine the two in a non-reactive container and stir. Let it sit at room temperature for four to 24 hours, then transfer to the freezer until frozen (about 2 hours). Strain the liquid off the now-solid fat through a coffee filter or cheesecloth, and it should be totally clear.
 
This cocktail was specifically inspired by the high quality of the Benton bacon, which is a good lesson to take. I tried this infusion with basic, grocery store bacon and the grocery store brand was flatter and with a lessor range of flavors.
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Quip of the Day:  Why did the pig bring bacon to school? For show and smell.
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Do you have a question or comment? Send your thoughts to [email protected]. All recipes and cooking tips are posted on our website https://www.perspectives-la.com/perspectives-on-food.
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