Bless Your Potato With Bacon Sauce
French fries, potato tortillas, and even the humble baked potato love to be garnished with a special sauce appropriate for the occasion. Ketchup, mayonnaise, or sour cream are common condiments, but they can be a little trite. Instead of playing it safe, show some courage. Turn the bacon into a smoked spicy potato sauce.
Bacon sauce, like bacon dressing and bacon soup , is made by grinding several strips of crispy cooked bacon into a base of some kind. This will infuse the mixture with the salty, smoky, and meaty flavor of the bacon, distributing it more effectively than just sprinkling chopped bacon over breasts. Bacon confetti usually bounces right away, but adding bacon to the sauce breaks the strips into hundreds of tiny pieces of meat, weighing them into the main mixture. Each fried fries will be topped with bacon sauce (bacon flavored). The bacon bits had the right idea, they just didn’t go far enough.
I find that a thin dipping sauce made with an unsaturated fat like olive oil makes a gourmet sauce that I can tweak with spices, but you can certainly use melted butter or a thicker seasoning as a base, like mayonnaise. Adding bacon to liquid fat compared to paste or emulsion is a slightly different process, but simple nonetheless.
For a butter or butter sauce, add fat to a blender, a small food processor, or a bowl that can hold an immersion blender (my preference). Add a couple of broken strips of well-done bacon to the oil. (Crispy bacon cuts into thinner pieces than flexible bacon.) Add any spices and/or seasonings you like. Turn on the blade machine of your choice and beat until the bacon crumbles into very small pieces and the spices are completely blended. Scrape down the sides and mix again if needed. The spicy bacon sauce goes great with French fries, but it’s even better when it seeps into the crevices of a potato or drizzles over a cracked baked potato.
For a thick sauce, use mayonnaise, sour cream, Greek yogurt, or ketchup. Pour required amount into a small bowl and set aside. Place a few strips of well-cooked bacon into a small food processor and run it until the bacon is broken into small pieces. If the meat starts to become spreadable due to the fat, you can add something dry that you will use in the finished sauce, such as dried spices, herbs, or even a teaspoon of sugar. These ingredients will cling to and absorb the fats to keep the mixture loose. Once the bacon is finely chopped, pour it into the base sauce you’ve set aside. Mix it with a spoon until combined. This sticky sauce goes great with baked potatoes, but is especially good with french fries, steak fries, and waffle fries. In fact, all fries.
spicy bacon sauce
Ingredients:
- ⅓ cup extra virgin olive oil (for a thick sauce, substitute with mayonnaise and follow the instructions in the second paragraph below).
- 2 strips of bacon, fried crispy
- ¾ teaspoon zaatar
- ¼ teaspoon cumin powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ¼ cayenne powder
Place all ingredients in a cup suitable for an immersion blender or a standard blender. Stir the ingredients until the bacon turns into small pieces. Drizzle a plate of potatoes or serve as a side dish as a dipping sauce.
For the mayonnaise base, set the mayonnaise aside in a small bowl. Pulse the remaining ingredients in a food processor until the bacon is finely chopped. Stir shredded bacon into mayonnaise.