Bacon Wednesday

This is it, the long-awaited Bacon Wednesday post about the tasting of the bacon vodka, and I hate to break it to you guys, but I don't think it will live up to your expectations, as it certainly did not live up to ours.

However, we're optimists here, and Stephanie has chosen to focus on where we went wrong and how we might improve in the future.

So never fear, this will not be the end of our story.

-Emily

Bacon Wednesday #10

Practice vs. Theory

or

Um, Sorry Guys!

So. Yeah . . . Bacon vodka. Um, dudes. I cannot tell a lie. It was not good.

I know! It seems so outrageous that it could not be as fantastic as imagined. Like if after the whole "Angelina's Pregnant!!!" thing Shiloh had turned out to be kind of a fug. Everyone would have been all, "Wha? Does not compute!" Okay, that was a lot of punctuation. But you know what I mean? Two amazing things that should be 2x the amazing when combined did not result that way. In fact, I feel like it was only .5x as amazing as taking a shot of vodka and chasing it with a strip of bacon would have been. (Which, hmm, maybe I should try. Hmm . . .)

Okay. Refocus.

The big question: how was it?

It was weird, I won't lie. We had it in Bloody Marys, which seemed delicious, again, because we like bacon, and we like Bloody Marys, and together, sure, why wouldn't that be good? Two to three savory ideas, combined. But we ran into a few problems. First, Emily had no ice. We figured, in terms of coldness, that freezer-chilled vodka and semi-chilled tomato juice and Clamato would work on that front. What we didn't account for was the thickness of drinking tomato juice. Or that the vodka would mainly taste like smoke. So on top of the sting of vodka, there was the sting of smoke. We dumped a lot of lukewarm Bloody Mary down the drain that night.

So where did it all go wrong?

Well, we have a few ideas.

Exhibit A: The Jar



So, it was murky with bacon bits and browned fat (I never want to type that phrase again). We froze it to collect the fat solids, as instructed by teh interwebs. But we think, per a discussion Emily had with a friend who regularly makes vodka infused with cherries and sugar, that we should maybe have let it sit another week or so . . .

Exhibit B: The Bacon


. . . although, was there enough left to even infuse? That bacon looks pretty sapped. Should we have browned it less pre-infusion? More? Just used more bacon, period?

Exhibit C: No Ice

Yeah, a Bloody Mary without ice? Thick. Tomato-y. A meal in a glass, sure, but not in the cool way.

Exhibit D: The Triple Filtration Process

Which is just a fancy name for straining it three times through a combination of paper towels and coffee filters in a colander. We thought because there was so much murkiness at first that once was definitely not enough. And it was still pretty yellow after the second time, and we thought "triple-filtered" would sound fancy. And then it was pretty pale. So we think that maybe the third time around filtered out too much pork essence (again, I don't want to type that again).

Will we do it again?

Yes. In fact, there has been some talk about a "Brave Souls" happy hour, with ice, to make more Bloody Marys with what's left from the batch. And, like I told Elissa, a pilot batch is just a jumping-off point to start negotiations (as Cher Horowitz would say).

So . . . stay tuned? I think there might be some perfecting of this process in the future. Because if vodka is Angelina and bacon is Brad, I demand 2x the amazing. Clumsy metaphor? Sure. But what do you want? I drank bacon vodka this week. I'm a little hazy.