Bacon and Chocolate: The Backstory

Photo by professor evil/Flickr CC

To me, the most interesting side of any compelling ingredient or food product, aside from deliciousness, is the backstory: How it came to be. How did David Chang devise his great pork belly buns? How did egg creams happen? Invariably, the backstory is full of twists and turns and free associations that are especially inspiring to cooks who like to push the envelope themselves.

I found a really good backstory on the box of Mo's Bacon Bar, a 41 percent milk chocolate bar laced with the unlikely combination of applewood smoked bacon and Alderwood smoked salt. It is at once delicious, satisfying, and odd, and it rides the recent crest of baconmania. Katrina Markoff, owner and chocolatier of Vosges, a line of exotically flavored chocolate, describes the roots of her salt-sweet-smoke theme in her childhood:

I began experimenting with bacon and chocolate at the tender age of 6, while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in Aunt Jemima syrup, as children often do. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of sizzlin' bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. And then, the magic--just a bite of the bacon was too salty and I yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate and syrup, so I combined the two.

In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point; for on that plate something magical happened, the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it -- chocolate.

I'd say, from the picture on her website. [Curator's note: In a yet better backstory even Sally didn't know, the eponymous Mo is Mo of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the same legendary city of our Behind the Counter locale. A great collaboration, and you can order the bar here.]

There was a good twenty years from this childhood anchoring of a taste memory to it's fulfillment in Mo's Bacon Bar: an inspiring reminder about the slow, mysterious routes of inspiration.