12:03 p.m.: About forty people, myself included, are penned in by stanchions, forming a zig-zag line; we’re all sweating like pigs and salivating like stray dogs outside a butcher’s window. The tantalizing scent of hot bacon is swirling around us, and just beyond the heads in front of me, I see food trucks and grills dispelling plumes of bacon smoke that would stir a corpse from a cryogenic slumber.
We’re all waiting to be let into the grounds of the 2nd annual Big Bites Bacon Festival outside the Queen Mary. The crowd is getting antsy. A woman besides me yells out the time, reminding the crew that we should have been let in a whole three minutes ago. This level of enticement can only go on for so long before things get ugly. Another tense minute passes. Foots start shuffling, and we’re released into the pork paradise, appetites all a-frenzy.
(Now a fair warning to those of you who don’t eat pork for ethical, religious or dietary reasons: The following contains graphic descriptions of bacon in the most improbable, outrageous, and downright obscene incarnations known to man. If you read on, you have only yourself to blame for any non-kosher cravings that may arise.)
Allie Kappmeyer, Heather Way and Haily Gaital wearing their bacon love.
12:24 p.m. Forgoing breakfast this morning was no doubt a good call. Free bacon-leaden hors d’oeuvres and bite-size samples abound. There’s about 45 food trucks and booths where food artisans are offering up their porcine wares. The question is where to start?
Bacon-stuffed, bacon-wrapped, bacon-sprinkled, bacon frosting, wet-cured, dry cured, bacon grease fried; if it’s got bacon and your mind can conjure it, you can most certainly find it here. And the bacon-ization is not exclusive to food: People are wrapped in bacon-wear and hard at work stuffing themselves with bacon. The crowd looks to be predominantly middle-aged so far.
I stop by Tomski Sausage’s food truck and take a bacon egg salad garnished with a round of sumptuous sausage. The salad is delightfully fresh and serves as an innocent beginning to what would shape up to be a gastro-odyssey of epic proportions.
Bacon, which is one of the oldest known cuts of meat, is so mouth-watering because it contains the once-mythical fifth flavor—umami. Now an established and recognized part of the palate, umami releases endorphins, which explains why people go gaga for bacon. And it explains why my buds are buzzing for more.
12:30 p.m.: Although I should have expected it, I’m still gobsmacked when I see an entire crispy hog being laid out on a booth—snout and all.
“You can say what part of the pig you’d like, if you want loin, belly, or part of the ham,” Dave Robicheau says. His son is the owner of Shady Grove Food, a Long Beach BBQ catering company. This recipe is his, however.
“The shoulders and ham are tougher meats and take longer to cook. The pork belly and the loin are leaner and drier,” he says
But where does the bacon come from?
“Pork belly. Bacon comes from the undercarriage of the belly. You take a slab and you cure it and then you smoke it—or you can roast it.”
I’m handed a piece of skin and loin meat. It’s drenched in a tasty apricot-ginger-habanero-pepper glaze. My eyes nearly roll to the back of my head… I’m in hog heaven.
Breakfast in Bed: A bacon and French toast fusion in cupcake form.
12:48-1:14 p.m.: A blur of excess; my notes are grease-stained and read only, “Struggling.” By the end of my rampage, all that remains is regret and a pair of hands in terrible need of a napkin.
A look back at the photos on my camera reveal the indignity of my consumption. I have apparently eaten what can only be described as a nesting doll of unreasonable decadence: a bacon-wrapped blonde pepper stuffed with a cheese-smothered shrimp. Known as chilitos cri cri, it’s the creation of La Puente-based restaurant El Cristalazo.
Others photos show evidence of an assortment of bacon-themed confections that have all met the same fate, including a French toast and bacon cupcake slapped with a dollop of maple syrup buttercream from The Cake Mamas’ booth and—are you ready for this?—a salted caramel bacon cinnamon roll.
Sitting down to eat this outlandish concoction, my mouth becomes a theater of war; salty and sweet swirling around with every spongy, gooey sporkful, duking it out to the last bite. Once the deed is done, and crumbs trail down my shirt, it’s the bacon’s saltiness that lingers long after the sweetness has melted away.
1:30 p.m.: Feeling gorged and gluttonous with a newfound rotundness, I cruise past more booths. Even though I’m busting at the seams and near the point of loosening the proverbial belt, I keep feasting. But why? Well, for one it’s so easy. There are hardly any lines and the superabundance of bacon this-and-that seems never-ending. Most of all, every booth seems to outdo its neighbor in innovation and sheer improbability.
When I think I’ve seen it all, someone’s infused shaved ice with maple-bacon or someone’s thought to shove bacon inside a Twinkie and throw it in a deep fryer. And I, showing zero self-control, place every delicious abomination I come across in my mouth.
1:50 p.m.: My nose leads me to the Dia de los Puercos booth where there’s a Hot Pocket-looking thing called an empanada. Its bulging belly was full of peanut butter, jelly, banana—and you guessed it—bacon. I bite into it, then again, then again. And it’s gone.
Next thing I know I’m sitting on a bench, doubled-over, utterly defeated.
2:10 p.m.: Sweet surrender. Donezo. Finito. With two more hours left in the fest, I shamble toward the exit feeling about twenty pounds heavier and fighting the oncoming bacon-induced coma. I get to my car and there’s a message from PETA placed under my windshield wiper. It has a picture of a frolicking piglet and below it the words: “I am not bacon. I am a living being, just like you.”