Night of Bacon: Eat 'n' Park's Midnight Buffet

From the instant my plane touched down in Pittsburgh, I knew my digestive tract was in for a hell of a ride. Met Diko and Kate at the airport, did the prerequisite hug-an'-how-are-ya thing, then... "You hungry?"

Hell yes.

The opening volley is not chronicled here, since anyone within spitting distance of a Chick-Fil-A can understand what I say when I say I had a #1 with an extra sandwich. With root beer, please. However, later that night, I was in for some gratuitous indulgings.

After an evening of shooting zombies/robots/terrorists at Dave and Buster's, my brother and I, along with a small cadre of his compatriots, made our way to the Eat 'n' Park for a Night of Bacon.

What is a Night of Bacon? Well, it's a breakfast buffet. And it has bacon. And the goal is to eat as much bacon as your tender heart desires. Because you can.

I was in the sandwiching mood, so I opted to have my first bacon intake be in the form of a bacon biscuit.

Now, that's a fair amount of bacon. But sometimes, you just have to mix it up a little, right? So Bayani, my dear brother and partner in crime on this webstain, split a waffle and stuffed it with bacon and sausage.

I could not let such a challenge go unanswered! I doubled the bacon, doubled the sausage, and threw in some pineapple to balance it all out. This combination, by the way, is highly recommended.

Mmm. Sweet and porky.

But my brother is not one to be outdone. We've been going at this all wrong, it seems. Biscuits, waffles, bready things of any kind... they just slow us down. We needed to get to the heart of the matter.

That's right. The sausagewich. Atkins would be proud.

Stay tuned, kids! If you think what we did Friday night was gross...

Bacon Grease Dinner Rolls

The ongoing saga to make use of the Strategic Bacon Grease Reserve continues. I mentioned in my Anniversary Lamb post that we had these dinner rolls from the breadmaker with them. I have to admit, I wasn't totally sold on this idea. I made bread, swapping out the butter for bacon grease, and something was... off... with the texture. The mouthfeel wasn't quite right, like it was too moist, and the bubbles were too big, so it wasn't exactly structural.

The good news is that I didn't have this problem this time around. The bad news is that I can't give you a recipe -- breadmaker recipes are specific per bread machine, so if you don't have the same breadmaker as I do, I can't help you. And if you do have the same breadmaker, you already have the recipe. But don't despair. Just about any breadmaker should include a dinner roll recipe, use it with the "dough only" setting.

Divvy up the dough into equal portions. To get that nice exterior shell, pull the outside edges down and around themselves, then gather them into a point and secure it with a pinch.



Arrange them on a cookie sheet evenly, then set them somewhere to rise. Luckily, the house was a little humid and a little warm, so rise, my little yeasty minions! RIIIIIIIIIISE!





Wa ha ha ha! Brush a little more bacon grease on top for a little browning, then bake:



Nice little bit of browning there on the underside:



Check out the lovely texture:



And it hollows nicely, creating a little bready shotglass for a bite of lamb:



Awesome. Still have a bit of bacon grease to go through, so the bacon grease shall return.

Bacon grease biscuits

Waste not, want not. I've been hanging on to the drippings from every pound of bacon for about... 5 years? I'd kept them in one of those quart-sized containers that Chinese food places deliver soup in, and to keep it from going rancid, I'd kept it in the freezer. Now that causes the cheap plastic to become very brittle, very quickly. When I moved in with my girlfriend, she dropped it. Twice. After shattering two containers, she blurted out, "You have this thing, but you never use it!"

Let's fix that, shall we?

Ho-kay. St. Alton's biscuit recipe is our target tonight. Note that there's 2 T of butter and 2 T of shortening, which will be switched out for bacon grease. The rest of the recipe will be left alone. Mostly.



The bacon grease complies nicely when you mush it into the flour mixture. Now, most people roll the dough out and then cut them with a round cutter. Then they say "when you reroll the dough, the second batch won't be as fluffy." Then why reroll? Unless your biscuits must be round, just plunk them down in a big rectangle, then use a pizza cutter to divide them.



And heck, while I've got the bacon grease out, let's brush melted bacon grease on the tops to add some browning and flavor.



You want fluffy? Here you go:



You want flaky? Here you go:



You want a tuna croquette stuck in the middle? We can do that too:



They've got just a hint of bacon flavor. Definitely there, but not quite to the point where it's clobbering you over the head. Very nice.