TGIFood
Bacon butter & bacon butter foil bread
This takes the idea of garlic butter (as you’d make for garlic bread) and makes it all about bacon, but garlic is still in the mix.
Use this to make the bacon butter foil loaf, as below, or smear it on toast or on baked potatoes, on hasselback potatoes after you’ve roasted them, or use it as a baste for a grilled steak or lamb or pork chops on the braai.
This recipe accompanies this column.
Ingredients
250 g salted butter (half a brick)
200 g streaky bacon, fried in a little butter and then finely chopped
1 small onion, chopped finely
2 Tbsp butter for frying the onion
3 garlic cloves, chopped finely
1 tsp picked thyme leaves
Salt to taste
Ground black pepper to taste
If making bacon butter bread, add:
1 whole small or half a large baguette
Method
Peel and chop the onion, melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the onion until softened but not coloured. Add the chopped garlic and thyme and cook, stirring, for a minute. Season with a little salt and black pepper, stir and taste. Adjust seasoning if necessary. Remove to a side dish and reserve.
Add the bacon rashers to the fat in the same pan and fry on both sides until cooked but not crisp and hard. Remove bacon and chop into tiny pieces, as finely as you can.
Add the 250 g butter to the same pan and put it on a very low heat. Let the butter melt completely, stirring the pan now and then to scrape up all the bits of extra flavour at the bottom.
Put the chopped onion, garlic, thyme and bacon back into the pan with the melted butter, stir well, and pour it into a container. Allow it to cool, then refrigerate until it is set.
Slice a baguette (French loaf) at 1.5 cm intervals but not all the way through to the bottom. Smear bacon butter generously onto the bread in each of the places where you have sliced, on both sides of the bread.
Wrap the loaf tightly in two layers of foil, with the inner side buttered (even with more bacon butter if you like). Bake it in a hot oven for 25 to 30 minutes or on the braai grid above hot coals until you can feel that the outside of the loaf is crisp when touched. DM/TGIFood
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