Makin' bacon and other culinary delights

Making one's own bacon, from the raw, just-cut pork belly, seemed as foreign to me a week ago as growing one's own wheat in pots on the back porch for making bread.

Once the process began unfolding, the peculiarity went away, largely because the formula is fairly simple: Cut the pork belly slab (left) into appropriate sizes and thicknesses, coat thoroughly in a salt cure formula, consisting of Kosher salt and brown sugar, wrap tightly in plastic for a wo-day cure, turning the package over after one day. Then one towel dries the meat, hangs it to dry for a day or two and then puts it in a smoker for a couple of hours.

On Monday, we will cook the bacon as part of a breakfast comptency test in which we also must prep, cook and plate a French omelet, eggs over easy and a poached egg.

Any bread that comes with the breakfast won't be from wheat I have grown on my back porch. I won't be doing that.

Bacon is the new bacon

Very little beats the flavor of a piece of pork belly. That's bacon to most of us.

The competitors on Bravo's Top Chef and on Food Network's Iron Chef and Chopped and many other chefs and regular home cooks use it to spike the flavors in many dishes, some of which need it sorely. (My own examples appear toward the end of this blog entry.)

Wednesday's Top Chef competitors included bacon in several dishes, most successfully. The winning Quickfire Challenge dish included a bacon jam, which head judge Tom Colocchio was so taken with that, he said later in his blog, he went home and worked to replicate.

Yet Colocchio also said at one point that bacon enhancement didn't work in every case.

In short, be judicious. Here are a few ways to use pork belly to enhance flavors:

* Cook smoked bacon to crispiness, then crumble onto just about any greens, including a salad.

* Render the fat from pancetta, or Italian bacon, in a large sauté pan just before dropping a pound of fresh spinach leaves into the pan for wilting.

* Wrap pancetta or smoked bacon around asparagus before grilling.

* Crumble crisped bacon into a grilled cheese sandwich just before grilling.

Or, serve it as the entrée, as Thomas Keller's Bouchon in Yountville, Calif., did when I ate there in July. Delicious!

Not your mom's grilled cheese sandwiches

Grilled cheese is as simple and straightforward a sandwich as there is. So why fiddle with it? You can make it better. Here are a few ways:

* Before grilling the sandwich, crisp cook one or two strips of bacon in the pan. Drain off all but a teaspoon or so of the bacon drippings and grill the sandwich. When done, crumble the bacon over the sandwich. (I did this Thursday evening to much acclaim.)

* Throw a couple strips of roasted green chile over the cheese before grilling.

* Mix a little Roquefort or other bleu cheese in with the jack or whatever other cheese you use. Oh, and use a white cheese. Even if you use cheddar, make it a white cheddar.

* Make a "Mexican" grilled cheese, otherwise known as a quesadilla. That's cheese between two tortillas. Corn or flour? Either will work. This is especially good with the chile strips. If they are unavailable, use pepper-jack cheese.

Four ways to improve on that classic of mom's kitchen.