Bacon was the zeitgeist this year, and recipes for pig candy were all over the place, and I kept hearing people talking about it as if it were the Second Coming, and this made sense because hello, it's candied bacon. But for some reason I was not totally convinced that pig candy was all that. A small part of me suspected that it was some kind of fairground-style gimmick, like deep-fried Snickers, tasty but notable mostly for its novelty.
How very, very wrong I was.
Guys. Pig candy.
Pig. Candy.
Pig candy is sex. It is sex with love. It is the kind of sex that takes hours and hours and sets off the smoke alarm. It is sweet and meaty and spicy and smoky and funky. It does strange things to one's perception of reality, and when it's fresh it drips.
Making pig candy is a lot of work, and it's really a job for two cooks working in shifts. It is easy to screw up, and is impossible to ignore or walk away from. (Is the above metaphor continuing of its own volition? Hm.) Basically, what you do is this: buy some good-quality thin-sliced bacon -- a party of 30 made short work of two full pounds of pig candy, and we were doling it out very sparingly, so plan on making way too much. You take this bacon, and you take some dark brown sugar and some cayenne pepper mixed together, and you pack the sugar on the bacon really good. Do not dredge: pack. Then you lay the slices of bacon out on a cookie rack which fits inside a rimmed baking sheet, put this in a cold oven, and turn it on to 350. After the oven gets up to temperature, you will need to turn the bacon every four minutes. You REALLY don't want it to burn, so take it out before it looks quite done; the melted sugar is like unto napalm and will finish the cooking off the heat. Then you let the oven cool down. Then you do it all again. One batch takes about half an hour. Your house will smell like the most ritzy, expensive private club in hell, and it will smell that way for days. You might as well just throw out the baking sheet; that shit is never getting clean again.
So what do you do with pig candy when it's done?
I'll tell you what you do: throw a party to which you invite your very most sexy friends, and as they arrive you hustle them into the kitchen, make them close their eyes, and feed them a slice of pig candy. Then you get to listen to them whimper and watch their faces become suffused with ecstatic wonder, and you can feel very smug indeed because you delivered the goods.
