The light restaurant trick to cut the bacon without a mess

The world is full of vain businesses. It doesn't make much sense to try cats on her stock, to disperse water from a stone or a nail Jell to a tree. And while there may be more than one way for cats, I can tell you from personal experience that eel skiing can be frustrated with a person. But of all the kitchen tasks that make my head thrown at the counter, the risk of room temperature bacon is one of the worst.

Slippery and squid, even if slightly warm, slides in the bacon, pancetta, salt pork and greasy fat strips and drift under the blade as they try to slice them. Sharp knife can just Complete the work, until you work fast and remain cold, but not at all, and it is more likely that you will have a ragged pile that will make torn, chopped, roasted and crushed pieces than the steady cuts of the beautiful fish on which you sought.

The reason for this is that animal fats are a complex mixture of various saturated and unsaturated fats and thus melt in a wide temperature range. While you need to heat the pork fat more than 38 ° C to fully display, some of its components are liquefied at room temperature. Tap with your fingers while cube and the heat of the body warms up, partly melts and creates a slippery texture. With each second, fat becomes more and more difficult.

Of course, as with many things, the solution is obvious, and this is something that many chefs do: keep it cold. What is less obvious is how cold.

You have some choices here. For example, you can keep all greasy pork products, such as Bacon and Pancetta, which is always well packed in the freezer, many restaurants do. KenjiFor example, he tells me Always keep the sliced ​​bacon in the freezerJust cut off what you need from frozen strips. (They inevitably insist on freezing, so attempting to cut each ribbon will only result in a lot of broken and torn fragments.) This method can be harder with bacon and other solid cuts such as Fatback, which freeze so hard to try them through a knife.

It can still work by throwing the frozen piece of greasy pork for a few minutes on an aluminum baking sheet until soft enough to cut. As we have shown before, The excellent conductivity of aluminum quickly passes the heat of the room into frozen foods sitting on it.

The other option I often do is keep the pork cuts in the refrigerator and throw them into the freezer for 10 to 15 minutes to get a deep cooling before slicing. After all, the goal is not to completely freeze the fat, but to reduce the temperature to make it functional solid. As the fat becomes colder, it hardens more, giving something solid to slide the knife.

This, as they say, is just as simple as the apple pie, and you, instead of being disappointed, will be just as happy as a pig … (not in the freezer).

December 2016