ADVERTISEMENT
Before we jump in, let’s get one thing straight: I want a bacon cheeseburger, which means a hamburger patty made of ground beef, with bacon used as a flavoring. You can make a sandwich that is pure bacon overload excess, and I’ve already done that very thing with my bacon attack!burger back in 2009 (a ground bacon patty served with bacon and bacon fat mayonnaise on a bacon fat and bacon-studded bacon bun). But today, we’re going for that familiarly delicious beef-bacon interplay. Capice?
This recent bacon cheeseburger binge started all because of a simple question posed on Reddit:
This has been something that has been mildly infuriating to me, but I have noticed that most restaurants that I have been to tend to place their bacon in an X on top of the meat instead of placing the bacon strips parallel to each other to get more coverage.
Is this purely for aesthetic reasons? Is this something that is widely taught in culinary school as the “proper way”? It just seems like it would make more sense to put the strips parallel so you can get more bacon per bite.
Legit question, right? Even better was the top response, which explained a completely novel way of arranging bacon by essentially forming each slice into a triangle before you cook it, adding stability and improved coverage to the mix.
Ideas that sound great don’t always work out so well in real life,* so I considered it my ethical duty as a man of science to cook bacon cheeseburgers at the office the next day for some serious testing. I made a half dozen burgers, using bacon arranged in different shapes to try and find the best balance of structure and stability. All bacon was cooked in the oven—the best way to cook bacon (with runner-up status going to the microwave).
*Which is how I ended up with a bag full of feathers, a set of hedge clippers, and an industrial-sized tub of rubber cement in my closet. Different story for a different day.
ADVERTISEMENT
