Cowboy Bacon | Spicy Candied Bacon | Food Wishes

Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with cowboy bacon.

That's right. I'm going to show you my take on this spicy candied meat treat, which I thought was invented by food bloggers. But historically speaking, cowboy bacon was in Israel. It just wasn't candied and covered in pepper rings. And besides the bacon, I'm also going to show you the greatest cowboy belt buckle ever.

But first things first and to get started, we'll go ahead and prep our pan, which means completely covering it with some heavy duty foil,

or I guess a couple strips of regular foil. And once that's been accomplished, we'll place over our baking rack, which is going to give our rendered fat a place to go. But if you don't have a rack, you can just use some crinkled up foil, which will sort of serve the same purpose. But anyway, once that's prepped, we'll start laying down our bacon strips, which should definitely be of the thick cut variety.

In fact, one of the original meanings of cowboy bacon

was bacon cut extra thick, which makes sense since they didn't have meat slicers. And they were probably slicing it up with honey knives. And if you do use something with a similar thickness, we'll be able to fit exactly one pound on this rack. And by the way, it's totally fine if a couple pieces are touching or slightly overlapping since, as you know, bacon shrinks when it cooks. And eventually, everything will be beautifully spaced. And that's it.

Once our bacon's been laid out, we will transfer that into the upper center of a 375 degree oven for 10 minutes, at which point we'll pull it out and we will flip that bacon over. And then we'll pop it back in for another 10 minutes since one of the keys to a perfectly candied bacon is to cook it about halfway before we start brushing on our glaze. Right. That way, some of the fat's already been rendered out.

And I really do think we end up with a much better texture than if we just started brushing on the glaze immediately. So once that bacon's flipped,