Anyone in a bad mood has probably joked at one time or another that they need the four food groups of salt, sugar, grease and fat to feel better. Fortunately, there are recipes that fulfill that admittedly tasty but unhealthy combination. One of these is caramelized bacon, in which a bacon slice is coated with melted sugar. The procedure is simple but could be confused with another basic cooking technique known as caramelization.
Caramelizing Food
To caramelize a food normally means to slowly cook it so that the natural sugars break down. This is a common cooking technique with vegetables such as onions and carrots. The result is a softer, sweeter vegetable that is lightly browned. Bacon has no sugar naturally, though highly processed bacon can have sugar added along with other ingredients like salt, so it can’t really caramelize when cooking.
Caramelizing Meat
To give bacon that sweeter taste, you have to actually add sugar. The sugar that is usually paired with bacon is brown sugar, giving the finished food a darker brown color with a hint of molasses flavor. When caramelizing bacon, you fully coat each slice with sugar, resulting in a candy-like layer on top of the meat. This dish is baked instead of pan-fried; put the bacon in the oven at about 450 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 15 minutes.
Caramelization Process
Caramelizing meat in this manner isn’t the same as making caramel candy, which often requires more ingredients than plain sugar, but it’s obviously not the same as caramelizing vegetables because the sugar is external. Caramelization is actually not that well understood, notes the San Francisco Exploratorium's website. Cooks can see what happens to the sugars visually, but it’s still basically unknown exactly what is happening inside those sugars.
Warning
Eat carmelized bacon only as an occasional treat. When you make caramelized bacon, you are turning already fatty meat into sugary, fatty meat, which is not a healthy meal if you eat it regularly. Normal bacon already has those thick strips of fat running through it -- 1 ounce of bacon has about 9 grams of fat, 3 of which are saturated -- and caramelized bacon has a good amount of brown sugar added, approximately 1/2 cup per 8 ounces of bacon, although recipes vary.
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