"Serving bacon for dessert, however, remains controversial. With sightings of bacon brittle, chocolate-covered bacon and bacon ice cream, bacon desserts have become the skinny jeans of pastry: trendy to a fault, saucy when successful, yet often ill-advised."
What can I say? The New York Times went right after me this week.
In an article about breakfast foods being adapted into desserts at high end restaurants, Julia Moskin espoused the glories of such dishes as oatmeal créme bruleé and "cereal milk" panna cotta with avocado puree -- both of which, if you ask me, seem somewhat questionable. Almost anything, she wrote said, could and should be adapted into a dessert. Except of course, bacon, which has apparently become so "in" that it's now "out."
I doubt Ms. Moskin could have known that I had a bacon dessert ready to post on the blog, but, all the same, I'm not apologizing. Because, sure, the bacon fad has passed by the high-end restaurants out there, but the move towards its use by adventurous home cooks is the next, natural step in how food trends and flavors pass down to the general public.
Every once in a while, a food trend will break out into the mainstream. It starts in high-end restaurants, moves to home cooks, gets down towards bistro cooking, and then, if it's really successful, breaks out into fast food. It's a fast process, too -- obscure flavors can become thought of as the norm in the blink of an eye. Don't believe me? Don't you remember how quickly the chipotle pepper became ubiquitous?
