Bacon Buns

If you're like me, you have a problem: you always have a container full of bacon drippings in your refrigerator. (To clarify, the only problem with this plethora of bacon drippings is making sure they get used up before they go bad.) A discussion of this issue a week ago Tuesday led to this Tuesday's experiment: bacon buns.

I took my old reliable hamburger/hot dog roll recipe and substituted bacon drippings for the butter. Since the recipe calls for heating the milk and butter to 100F before combining ingredients, and since bacon drippings melt nicely at 100F, it seemed success would be likely. To account for the extra sodium in the drippings, and to give a boost to the bacony bouquet, I also reduced the 2.5t of salt in the recipe to 2t, using 1t of table salt and 1t of Bacon Salt (which does a nice job of lending "meaty smoky" flavor to things, but doesn't actually taste like bacon in our opinion).



For a final touch, I brushed some room-temperature bacon drippings on top of the rolls and crosscut the tops.



The verdict: while they were not strongly bacon-flavored, they did have a nice "meaty" flavor. They also had a nice crunch to the crust and were soft and dense on the inside, similar in texture to a potato roll. They stood up well against the very flavorful burgers from Thundering Hooves and the watercress, bitter greens, and strong mustard accompaniments. Josh will have to supply his photographs of the finished dinner product - stay tuned!