Dan Taylor slathers Baconnaise on turkey sandwiches and has used it as a sauce to dunk steamed shrimp. The Lutherville foodie also makes a dip by crumbling bacon into warm cheese that he calls "life-altering."
Phillip Kerrigan, a Baltimore furniture restorer, has recently tried bacon bread pudding, bacon peanut butter cups, bacon toffee and bacon rum. For a friend's birthday, he whipped up a batch of homemade bacon and egg ice cream.
Here are just two proud soldiers of the burgeoning Bacon Nation, marching forward boldly and bravely, if somewhat greasily, striving to push the conventional limits of a once-ordinary breakfast meat.
Bacon, these days, is so much more than bacon. For the obsessive and adoring Bacon Nation, it's about cheap thrills and a chance for Internet fame.
And they're eating bacon like it's an extreme sport.
"There's just been a cult following around it, and it's deserved," says Dave Lefkow, who along with his bacon-crazed friend Justin Esch invented Bacon Salt and Baconnaise, a bacon-flavored mayonnaise. "Everyone not only loves bacon, but is obsessed by it."
Obviously, bacon has been around - ancient Romans reportedly fried it up. But somehow, as inventive as the Romans were, they missed the opportunity to create the Bacon Explosion. Or The Porkgasm. They never, as Esch recently did, made a hamburger entirely of ground bacon and declared it "grossly good."
They never, as Bacon Today "Chief Baconographer" Corey James did, took prosciutto, wrapped it in Canadian bacon, then wrapped that in turkey bacon, then encased the whole thing in double-smoked, thick-sliced bacon.
They never took pictures and videos of such creations, posted them on blogs, Flickr and YouTube.
So why are so many people suddenly so into bacon? James thinks it's about people taking guilty pleasure in eating something that's nutritionally taboo, and then extracting even more bliss by exponentially increasingly the decadence factor. A hot dog is bad for you. A hot dog wrapped in bacon and sandwiched between two oblong maple doughnuts is hard-core food porn.
"If it's bad to start with, it's like, how can we make it slightly badder to get more attention," James says.
This over-the-top behavior might have something to do with a slight uptick in national bacon sales. Last year, Americans bought more than 511 million pounds of it - an almost 3 percent increase from the year before, according to Hormel Foods.
