For the love of Bacon & Bourbon

Here is a solution to mix your love for food and drink. I love Bacon and I love Bourbon.I present to you here a well known practice of infusing flavours of smoked bacon into bourbon. The pictures shown here are straight from work outs at my home. "Statutory statement: Do try this at home." If you tried this , you will surly realise how well the smoky flavours of bacon complements the charcoal filtered flavours of bourbon.

Like most techniques of infusing spirits this one is quite simple too. The technical term for this methodology is "Fat Washing".

Step1, Pan fry some smoked bacon. I fried about 15 strips.

Step 2 Collect all the fat in the pan from frying bacon into a small container. I got about 100 ml of fat

Step 3 Pour the fat into bourbon. I mixed 100 ml fat with 350 ml of Bourbon. I used a relatively inexpensive bourbon called "Benchmark" easily available in wine stores in Bangalore. Rs.1500 a bottle of 750ml. Make sure to use a wide mouth bottle or jar when you mix the fat and the bourbon. You will now why - soon.

Step 4, Chuck the concoction into deep freezer for a while. A while can be 2 hours to 2 weeks depending on your patients. I left it for 2 days and then took it out.

Step 5. The fat would have frozen in the jar, but the spirit would not as its free

zing point is much below your freezer`s best. Now use a spoon and pull out the frozen fat and the remaining spirit in the jar is now infused with the bacon flavours. A wide moth jar is helpful to scrape out the fat easily

Step 6. Filter the spirit using a muslin cloth several times to make sure you have removed fine fat particles as much as possible. And tadaaaaaaaaaaa....your bacon infused bourbon is ready.You may drink it the way you prefer your bourbon but in a post soon I will show how to use this with the ginger adn honey syrup to make a delicious cocktail. Till then, have fun...