Bakin' Bacon Cookies

The other evening I was sharing a piece of Nosh This bacon crack with my friend Tuck Mayo, a severe meat eater, when he shared with me his recipe for Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies! "You just replace the butter in the Nestle Toll House Cookie recipe with bacon fat." That's it? "Yep." So easy! Once a month I bake cookies for my RADAR Reading Series, so I decided that BCCC would be the December offering. This is why me and my entire home now smell like a giant greasy, smokey slab of bacon.

So firstly you have to cook up enough bacon to siphon one cup of fat from it. That's about two packages of bacon.

I ate this much bacon once. I washed it down with a bunch of homemade beignets and coffee, and I didn't have a bowel movement for so long it became painful to walk, and I had to be driven to Walgreens to purchase this little glycerin thing you put in your butt to make you poop. I now fear mass quantities of bacon, as everyone should. What am I going to do with all meat?! I'm not going to eat it. Especially since if I want to savor the taste of bacon, all I have to do it chew on a piece of my hair, or suck on my shirt sleeves or a dishtowel or something.

Here are your ingredients: 

2 + 1/4 cups of flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 cup bacon grease 

3/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

2 cups chocolate chips

Mix the flour and the baking soda and the salt together, while making  BACON PLAYLIST on your computer.

In the awesome Kitchen Aid mixer you found on sale at an outlet mall on the side of the road somewhere in Colorado, mix bacon grease, the sugars, and the vanilla. What, you don't have a Kitchen Aid mixer? Go get one, Mary! I know they're a hunk of cash but they're worth it! At the time I purchased this I was in a relationship with a stoner who feared change, and the sight of the new appliance entering the house was so devastating no amount of bong rips could soothe the anxiety. We broke up. Can you believe that? We got back together, but any relationship that does not celebrate the addition of a glamorous new Kitchen Aid mixer is doomed. Love dies, but Kitchen Aid mixers last forever, pretty much.

Blend it together while musing on what makes music 'bacony'. The White Stripes are definitely bacony. Band of Horses, too. Bacony music seems like music that suggests you're making camp coffee on the side of a mountain, in a damp chill while wearing something plaid.

Add your eggs. Nick Cave seems sort of bacony too, like the flecks of charred grease that floated in the fat each time I dumped it from the pan. That was sort of Nick Cave-ish, maybe a bit like The Cramps. The Cramps is bacon music.

Add the flour. You know what's not bacony? Hercules and Love Affair. La Roux. The Knife. I think bacony music is basic rock n roll. X is bacony. The Kills are bacony. Bacon is like the cigarettes of meat. If you can imagine the song being sung by a person who is clutching a cigarette, it is probably good bacon music.

Add the chocolate chips. It feels good to empty a bag of chocolate chips into a dish. Like, yeah, I'm using the whole fucking bag! Of chocolate chips! Are you with me?

Look how greasy the dough is! While normal cookie dough is sort of gloppy, this dough is more gloopy. I will not be licking the bowl or otherwise sampling the raw dough. I also won't be licking the frying pan.

Oh yeah, preheat that oven to 375! Drop the dough in rounded tablespoons onto an ungreased cookie pan. Shove the little bastards in there and let them cook for 9-11 minutes.

Burn a batch while agonizing over whether or not Joy Division is bacony. Really. Note that although the cookies are like seriously burnt, they're not hard or crispy. They're sort of sluggish and oily and they slide off the pan into the garbage with a certain heaviness.

Successfully bake a batch of Bacon Chocolate Cookies. Look at them! They look . . . different. I don't know if my lousy digital camera captures their aura. They look like they have a secret inside them. Like they're up to no good. Their lightly browned outsides remind me of the faces of women who've had plastic surgery. They're not what they seem.

Let them sit on the baking sheet for two minutes thinking about what they've done. Then put them on a wire rack to cool.

I can't eat any kind of chocolate chip cookie - or really any cookie at all without a glass of ice cold milk. Like, really cold. Sometimes I put it in the freezer for a few minutes.

Hmmmm. They taste . . . different. Do they taste bacony? I think, a little. It's more like they taste like a hot frying pan. Do they taste greasy? I mean they're not bad - I will eat another one - but it's not the bacon that makes them not bad, it's the chocolate chips. Maybe they'll taste better when they're cooled a bit more and the bacon fat solidifies or something? I think I like them with butter better.  mean, I actually believe that a basic, simple chocolate chip cookie is like the best thing ever and should not be improved upon, but I couldn't resist baking non-vegetarian cookies, just to for the adventure of it. The taste of them remains mysterious.

As for the Bacon Playlist, I realized that I really need to be making a BACON CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE PLAYLIST! Which is a vastly different undertaking. Here is what I came up with, limited by the songs I have on my computer. Some songs speak to the bacon. Some speak to the cookie, the chocolate chips. Some speak to the unholy alliance of bacon and cookie, to their hybrid nature, their mystery, to the duality alive within them. Some speak to the cookie's holistic and undeniable power. All selections were intuitive.

Cannonball / The Breeders
Aphrodisiac / Bow WowWow
Let Me Fix My Weave / Missy Elliot
Disorder / Joy Division
Dumbwaiters / The Psychedelic Furs
Nice Boys / Guns and Roses
The Wrong Way / TV on the Radio

Crimewave / Crystal Castles

Destination Unknown / Missing Persons
Good Sister / Bad Sister / Hole
I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts / X
Dirt / The Stooges
Dimestore Diamond / Gossip
Jumble, Jumble / The White Stripes
Let's Spend the Night Together / David Bowie
I Like It Rough / Lady Gaga

By Michelle Tea