Ruhlman BLT Challenge - Jowl Bacon

Michael Ruhlman has his BLT-from-scratch Challenge.

In his words, the goal is:

A collective challenge for all of you who really love to cook: Make a BLT from scratch. No, this does not mean raising a piglet for the bacon or growing your own wheat to grind into flour. Yes, extra credit for either, but I want this to be a challenge that everyone can accept, whether you live in a Manhattan walk-up or rural North Carolina, Alaska or suburban splendor: make a BLT from scratch, photograph it and send the photo to me. If you blog, blog about it (and please link back to this post to encourage others to accept the challenge).

As he later wrote:

The key here is that the sandwiches featured the pork belly—the meat was thicker than the bread. This is really a pork belly sandwich, garnished with L, T and mayo.

Here's the critical cooking point for using bacon this thick in a sandwich. If you were simply to cook the bacon in a pan, it would be difficult to make it tender enough to eat without yanking it all out of the sandwich. Belly is a well-worked muscle that need tenderizing. Traditional bacon is tender because it's sliced so thin. The way to make slabs of bacon tender is through long gentle moist cooking.

Sorry Michael - but for crazy folks like myself, it means importing the best-tasting hogs on the planet, and raising them for their fat quality. Because how else are you going to win the BLT challenge?

Here's my solution for anyone who wants to win the BLT challenge.

1. Import the pigs that make the best tasting cured products in the world.
   
2. Raise the pigs for the highest fat quality.
3. Make jowl bacon from the Mangalistas. Jowl bacon isn't tough like belly bacon (see picture above), so it cooks up tender - because it is nearly all fat. There's no need to tenderize fat!
   
4. Make your BLT -- or just eat the jowl bacon, without any L or T, because as Ruhlman says:

The key here is that the sandwiches featured the pork belly—the meat was thicker than the bread. This is really a pork belly sandwich, garnished with L, T and mayo... Here's the critical cooking point for using bacon this thick in a sandwich. If you were simply to cook the bacon in a pan, it would be difficult to make it tender enough to eat without yanking it all out of the sandwich. Belly is a well-worked muscle that need tenderizing. Traditional bacon is tender because it's sliced so thin. The way to make slabs of bacon tender is through long gentle moist cooking.

So here's my secret: just use jowl bacon, from a properly fattened Mangalitsa pig. It is practically all fat. It will be tender and melt in your grateful mouth. There's never any gristle to get in the way (see photo). Belly, as Ruhlman says, is more problematic. So discard the belly, and go for the jowl.

When you've got such incredible jowl bacon, you really don't need the L and the T. The Jowl bacon alone is enough.

Kavin Du: with this one powermove, you won the BLT challenge.

If that sounds unbelievable, just look at what this Mangalitsa customer had to say, about his own jowl bacon.

Hear me now, believe me later: in the near future, people won't be talking of pork belly and bacon, but rather Mangalitsa jowl bacon. It won't be Michael Ruhlman's "BLT Challenge", but rather Michael Ruhlman's "MJb challenge" - that is, Mangalitsa jowl bacon challenge.

Because Mangalitsa jowl bacon is so superior. If you are going to spend time making bacon, you might as well make Mangalitsa jowl bacon - and you don't need the lettuce and tomato if you have Mangalitsa jowl bacon.

Then Michael Ruhlman will change the above text to:

The key here is that the sandwiches featured the Mangalitsa jowl —the Mangalitsa jowl bacon was thicker than the bread. This is really a Mangalitsa jowl bacon sandwich, garnished with an insignificant amount of L, T and mayo.

Michael: No disrespect! If you are reading this, drop me an email and I'll send you a few pounds of Mangalitsa jowl bacon. This is better than any other bacon I've produced (e.g. Barley-finished Berkshire hogs for the French Laundry). I'd be surprised if there's ever been a tastier USDA-inspected bacon on offer in the USA.