Recipe: The Bacon Bowl

 

The bacon bowl has been chasing me in my dreams. I can’t get away from it.
To an observer, my bacon-chase-dreamscape probably looks something like this (if you can’t see the video, watch it on YouTube here.)

It’s scary, really. Last night I took out a load-bearing wall. (Hat tip to Janette for the video!)
See, last week, I found this little gem on Amazon. Since I’m not a huge fan of microwaving bacon, much less microwaving bacon in whatever chemical nightmare those things are molded with, I posted it to facebook and offered unlimited virtual high-fives to anyone who could figure out how to make one out of cast iron. (Knowing, ya know, how motivating the offer of a virtual high-five is to most. Just danglin’ the carrot. Daaaang-glin’ the carrot.)
All you kitchen geniuses informed me that, in fact, you can use almost anything to make a bacon bowl. Inverted muffin pans are especially useful as bacon-bowling molds. Mind. Blown.
(Leave it to me to think an as-seen-on-TV product is required to do anything awesome. In my defense, I own six Snuggies, and I swear they make watching Shahs of Sunset that much more awesome.) 
So use-almost-anything I did. While I have a cast iron muffin pan – vintage Wagner, thankyouverymuch – the cups are just a little too close together to wedge bacon betwixt them. So, I turned a small glass oven-safe dish upside-down and wrapped it in 3 strips of bacon, and secured the bacon with a bit of my Regency Natural cooking twine (find it here). I placed the inverted bacon-wrapped bowl inside a larger glass dish to catch drippings. Behold, an illustration:

A note: it’s incredibly important to source your bacon well. Conventional bacon from pigs raised in factory farms is as unhealthy as the environment the pigs are raised in, and it will do the body no favors. EatWild can help you locate a small farmer raising pigs appropriately.
I placed a cookie sheet in the rack above the bacon dishes to catch popping grease, and baked the whole deal at 400 degrees for around 30 minutes (timing will vary based on bacon thickness and your desired done-ness, so check frequently).
Voilà. Upon cooling, you get a bacon bowl! (And a dish full of bacon drippings that’s fabulous for roasting veggies.)
I served a mix of roasted brussels sprouts and sweet potato in the bacon bowl. Delicious!

This bacon bowl is fairly large, but this could easily be made with smaller bowls or small muffin tins to create perfect appetizer bacon bowls.
I’m wondering – is there an easier way to make a bacon bowl? Let me know in the comments. If you’ve got your own blog post about it, be sure to leave it below!
Thanks for reading!