As a dessert option, bacon is old hat at this point. Restaurants around the country are always firing up new ways to blend cured, crispy strips of pig into succulent final courses.
In D.C., one need look no further than Birch and Barley’s Sunday brunch menu, which is best capped with a serving of toffee-and-bacon-flecked doughnuts. Diners at Austin’s Foreign and Domestic can feast on “The Pig Licker”, which features thick slices of bacon dipped in pralines, draped in dark chocolate and served with bacon-flavored root beer and a pork rind churro. And last year, Manhattan witnessed the opening of Baconery, a shop featuring all sorts of porcine-infused baked goods.
The whole craze is best traced back to Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of The Fat Duck in Bray, England and one of the world’s most acclaimed molecular gastronomists. It was Blumenthal, in 2004, who cooked up a bacon-and-egg ice cream to serve at his three-Michelin-starred restaurant. Like a spark of ingenuity atop Olympus, the notion of salty, fatty pork as a closing dish spread across the dining industry.
Fast food chains, of course, are not likely to be on the leading edge of haute cuisine trends, preferring to cash in on the frenzy when mass production and mass hysteria is most feasible. The zenith of the bacon frenzy might already be passed, but the hot, boring summer is the perfect opportunity to roll out one of the fast food industry’s most reliable staples—the stunt food. In just 10 weeks, Taco Bell sold $100 million worth of its new tacos with tortilla shells made from Doritos.
Better yet, consider the Double Down. Two years ago, closer to the height of bacon-mania (remember the Tumblr-turned-book phenomenon This Is Why You’re Fat?), KFC introduced a grotesque sandwich in which deep-fried chicken breasts replaced bread. Between the breasts were strips of bacon, melted cheese and “Colonel’s sauce.” Sam Sifton ate one and lived to tell the sordid tale.
Well, meet this summer’s bacon-laden stunt product: Burger King today, after a test period in Nashville, introduced its “Bacon Sundae.” For a couple of bucks, you can have a dish of industrial strength vanilla soft-serve sitting in a pool of chocolate and caramel sauces and topped with bacon bits and—get this—a full strip of bacon.
On paper, it sounds great. Then again, so do Marxism and the Miami Heat.
Two dining companions and I tried the dish this afternoon. Let’s be clear: This is Burger King ice cream. There were no expectations of anything great. The clerk at the restaurant from which we purchased them chuckled when I referenced the dessert as “those bacon sundaes the Internet has been talking about.”
Burger King’s ice cream is thick, but bland. The vanilla, what little of it there is, is mild and quickly forgettable. But slurping down the ice cream as it melted in the sun, I could feel its layers of xanthan gum coursing through my veins. Still, we kept digging in.
And the bacon? Well, true to the economics of bulk quantity at low prices, Burger King’s strips are not the stuff of fine dining. Heck, they’d barely make the grade at IHOP. There’s very little pork flavor. The tiny chunks mixed throughout the concoction do the trick of balancing out the sugary ice cream with a savory hit. But the large bacon strip is brittle and too salty; the mouth-feel resembles that of a discarded bit of tree bark.
Still, it’s bacon and ice cream for less than $3 a pop. Must we really be so picky?
“This is retarded, but whatever,” one of my companions said.
As I diminished my own sundae, I noticed that after a first unhappy bite, I was leaving that bacon strip alone. Does bacon work as a garnish at all? I remember a dinner at Farmers and Fishers several years back in which one member of my party ordered a bourbon-based cocktail finished off with a chocolate-dipped piece of bacon. She was less than impressed. And that bacon was no factory-floor-cut piece of pig like the one sticking out of my Burger King sundae.
Yet we still devoured the sundaes. Maybe it was the weather. Or perhaps the real talk we were conversing in.
“Here’s my review: I don’t know why I’m still eating this,” my other sundae-testing companion said. She took one more bite before tossing the rest away.
Correction: This article incorrectly referred to a restaurant in Austin, Texas that serves a dish called “The Pig Licker” as Porkgasm. The restaurant is Foreign and Domestic, a much more inviting name.
