Test #191: Bacon and ALMOND JOY PIECES

The subject
When not eating bacon, the staff of BDJ Labs often fortifies themselves with one of the other major food groups: candy. Almond Joy is one of our favorite chocolatey confections, but we have to agree with the sentiment of the taller gentleman in this comic: while the candy delivers the eponymous nuts the label promises, we've never munched down on Almond Joy and found it contained actual boundless happiness.

Almond Joy Pieces, however, are another story. When we first encountered them at the National Confectioners Association's 2009 show, we were happy to see the fine people at Hershey's had the bright idea to expand the "pieces" concept to other candies in its stable, including York Peppermint Patties, Hershey's Dark and Almond Joy. While all were yummy, the Almond Joy Pieces made us jump for...well, joy. They pack wee pieces of almond and coconut in a candy shell, perfectly replicating the experience of eating the full-size candy bar in a wee little nugget of yum. The only letdown: the candy wouldn't be on the market until the end of the year, which meant that when our samples were eaten (30 seconds after we got home from the show, sadly), we'd have MONTHS to wait until we could restock.

We couldn't stop ourselves from happy-dancing when we saw the bright blue package on our local grocery shelves last week. We took home two of the stand-up pouches and promptly wrapped some of the buttony candies in bacon.

The results
Ooh, baby. The shell melted completely, and the colored sugar oozed out the side, which lead to blue bacon (neat!). What remained was the chocolate, almond, and coconut goodness, so the tidbits were pretty much just bacon-covered Almond Joy--a flavor combination we give all-around enthusiastic thumps up. Definitely worth repeating. Our one recommendation: if you or your guests might find Smurf-colored bacon a turnoff, weed out the blue Pieces and use just the beigey ones.

The conclusion: Bacon + Almond Joy Pieces = ooh, baby.

Bacon Bit: Genius in Marketing

There are hardly words to express our glee. If only this bacon-hawking monster vehicle were parked in our neighborhood. Thanks to Carl Weaver at the National Confectioners Association for bringing this awesome sight to our attention.

Test #190: Bacon and CARROT

The subject
People say they love a certain food all the time. But when we at BDJ Labs say we love carrots, we mean it. Carrots are the closest to candy that a vegetable can come, and we sing the praises of the person who first packaged baby carrots. This love for the vegetable traces back to our childhoods, during which carrots were frequent, welcome occupants of our lunchboxes--and in the case of BDJ Labs' Head Tech Jenni S., a carrot was a cherished friend. Well, sort of; she had a stuffed carrot doll (like the one at left, only about a foot tall and with dangly arms/legs) that she carried around. She was a weird kid.

But we digress. Carrots rule--not nearly as much as bacon, but they rank among our favorite non-meat edibles. We at BDJ Labs figured that wrapping a lucky wee baby carrot in a strip of salted pork could only increase our deep abiding love for the king of vegetables, so we swaddled one infant carrot in a bacon blanket. Let's see how the delivery turned out...

The results
Our expectation of success didn't diminish our pleasure at the results. The carrot cooked up perfectly--still crisp, not at all mushy--and its sweetness increased, making it a perfect complement to the savory bacon. Were we to do this recipe again, we'd bacon-wrap a whole litter of baby carrots, bake them, and sprinkle a wee bit of brown sugar on them in the last few minutes of cooking. Mmm, candied bacon carrots...

The conclusion: Bacon + carrot = Thumbs up, doc

Bacon Bit: Beer AND Bacon? We're There!

So there's this site called Groupon, and if you sign up, every day you get offered some fabulous deal in your city--half-off your bill at a great sushi place, 60% a massage at a spa, 75% off at a skydiving joint, etc. We at BDJ Labs don't hit the "buy" button on Groupon deals a fraction of the times that we want to, because times are tight and stuff. However, this morning Head Lab Tech Jenni S. saw today's offer in her inbox and took about a millisecond of thinking before signing up. Here's the deal:

Paddy Long's, an Irish flavored joint on Diversey in Chicago, offers a two-hour event during which they pair five different bacons with five different seasonal brews. The hosts guide you through the Italian pancettas and Danish bacon and other meats, and how their various sweet/savory properties make them great matches for the beers and ales they're mated with. The kicker: Groupon's offering the experience for $20, about half the normal pricetag.

Without further ado, here's the link. Click here, and we'll see you there.

Bacon Bit: Bacon turkey review coming

BDJ Labs' tech department seems to have misplaced (again!) the cord that connects the BDJ Labs' BaconCam to the BaconPuter's USB port so, unfortunately, we haven't been able to upload photos of the results yet. Hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to send our Head of Procurement out to a local computer store to replace it. Until then, please enjoy this video, quite possibly the cutest 17 seconds ever.

Bacon Bit: Not turkey bacon--BACON TURKEY

We won't go into our feelings about the culinary lie that is "turkey bacon"--we'll let this pic tell that tale for us. We will, however, share with you our love for bacon turkey. You hopefully already know how fabulous a turkey club is, with its marriage of moist bird slices and salty pig strips. Cook the two together, though, and the union becomes a holy one.

The process is insanely simple: use your fingers to loosen the skin over the breast, so that there's a nice gap. This is where you slide strips of delicious smoked bacon. We prefer Nueske's for the purpose--the intense smokiness and sweetness of the applewood permeates the turkey and makes the bird itself take on a smoked flavor. Anyway, so you slide the strips so that there's a single layer across the turkey's whole top area, and cook like you usually would. If you need help figuring that out, I highly recommend the hugely helpful and informative Butterball site--our favorite feature is the turkey-time calculator; you just type the poundage in, and it tells you the time.

We can't tell you how delicious the gravy from a bacon turkey is. It's not a secret or anything--we just don't want to drool on the keyboard and short out the BDJ Labs laptop.

Happy Thanksgiving!

On loss and love of BACON

NOTE: Today's post is written by BDJ Labs' head technician, Jenni S. The views expressed herein are her own and not necessarily shared by the rest of the BDJ Labs staff, its management or owners. Okay, they totally ARE, but we had to say that stuff. Lawyers. Anyway...

I'm a loser. At least, I am according to the results of Wendy's hunt to find the country's biggest bacon fan. The Twitter-based contest consisted of 12 days of gunning for points by tweeting with the #bacon hashtag, writing bacon haiku, taking pics of bacon, making bacon crafts, blogging about bacon, answering bacon questions, creating bacon videos, yada yada yada. Despite the fact that I love bacon more than anyone else I've ever met, I came in fourth. I guess I should be happy, considering I didn't learn about the contest until it'd already begun, and I didn't figure out the trick to racking up the points until almost the very end. Yet, when the bacony smoke cleared and I found myself without a single prize, I was devastated. Ah, well--what would any sporting contest be without bad calls and/or heartbreaking losses?

Friday night, when the curtain went down on the Wendy's contest and I learned I'd lost, I was as heartbroken as a 8-year-old girl finding out Santa had forgotten to leave a Barbie Dream House underneath the Christmas tree and, instead, discovered boxes of Carter's undershirts. I'd worked my bacon-loving BUTT off the last day of the contest to secure the $200 daily prize. I made a bacon mobile:


...I made a rocking, blingy bacon bracelet:

Isn't it pretty? By the way, in case you were wondering about what happened to the strip entwined around my wrist, and whether or not it got tossed, you needn't be concerned. I didn't waste the bacon--this sucker, raw in the picture, went right from around my wrist to a preheated oven, where it was baked to crispy perfection. Yum, lunch. In fact, not a single strip of delicious, savory bacon was wasted in the entire course of the contest--not by ME, anyway.

...with the help of Seth at BaconFest Chicago, I tracked down bacon-lover Kelly, who graciously sent me pics of her Japanese-character tattoo of the word "bacon" with my Twitter ID stuck next to it:


I tweeted about bacon all day long--exceeding the maximum of three times an hour. I came up with countless things that bacon would say #ifbaconcouldtalk. I posted a heartwarming bacon story to the Wendy's site (with photographic evidence submitted to the contest's cruise director, UrBaconMeCrazy). I did every single thing I was supposed to do, and as of 5pm, by my calculations I was so far ahead of the pack that I could have STOPPED tweeting about #bacon and #ifbaconcouldtalk at that point and still came out on top. Yet, when I checked the leader board at the end of the evening, there I was, behind several others. I was heartbroken.

Two days later, however, my pain has abated greatly. In fact, it's been replaced by the realization that I don't give a pork butt about points and tweets and leader boards. No offense, IsCoolerThanYou or SimplyDab--you might have racked up the gift cards and prizes, but I came away from the contest with something better: the rock-hard conviction that I AM THE GREATEST BACON LOVER EVER. It's not that I eat more bacon than anyone--I have no idea or desire to quantify the amount--or that I talk about bacon more than anyone. It's that my passion for all things bacon runs so deep that I cannot imagine it running any deeper, in anyone else, anywhere. Bacon is in my SOUL. So there.

I'm very thankful to the wonderful people at Wendy's for putting their bacon love out there so strongly, and for having the cajones to put together such a powerful, creative social media experiment. I hope this is only the beginning of the company's push to achieve total bacon global domination. I'll back that 100%.