Grease Biscuits With Bacon and Fat Before Baking
Greasing bread and biscuits before going into the oven with any kind of fat (or egg or dairy) is a good way to add color and flavor, but we often seem to default to butter and olive oil when it comes to comes to fat. I have nothing against these two fats — they’re great — but we should all try bread or biscuits with bacon grease.
Perhaps I enjoy cooking with bacon fat even more than eating bacon. It is hard to say; I am very fond of both things and am prone to emotional fluctuations. One thing I know for sure: only a fool throws fat off bacon (and only a public threat dumps it down the drain). The smart person conserves fat, stores it, and then uses it to make extremely flavored homemade mayonnaise, salad dressings, and the perfect scrambled eggs; and geniuses smear them on the top of a cookie before going into the oven.
It adds a nice color and shine, but it has a smoky, salty, meaty flavor. Cookies are the most natural pairing, but any bread product would benefit if it is first spread in the oven with melted, seasoned lard. I imagine Olive Garden style breadsticks with bacon fat and that is lovely. You can use a pastry brush, but you can also use (washed) hands. Either way, you don’t need a lot of fat – just enough to give your bread a subtle sheen – but I wouldn’t want the fat to get stuck, not used, in the bristles of a pastry brush.