Chocolate Covered Bacon

I bet you wish, right about now, that your computer had smell-o-vision.  Mmmm, bacon!

 

 

And what could be better than just plain old bacon?  You guessed it, bacon with chocolate. 

After cooking my bacon (thick cut bacon from the Roseaurs meat counter.  This is, in my humble bacon loving opinion, the best bacon ever, by a delightful Pacific Northwest grocer) to a nice crisp texture, and blotting the grease off, I started the double boiler.  Okay, so it is less a double boiler, and more like two pots stacked on top of each other.  Gotta work with what you've got, right?  This is probably a chocolatier's nightmare, but I have never had a problem with moisture getting into the chocolate.  Let's get real here, I'm melting semi-sweet chocolate chips to put on bacon.  This is no gourmet kitchen.

 

While I melted down the chips, I broke each bacon strip into bite-sized pieces.  Usually I keep them the size of half a strip of bacon, but since I am making these for my class (of 7th graders), I thougth I'd keep them smaller.  I know preteens will try nearly anything, but I don't want this goodness to go to waste!

 

The past several times I have made this I have just dipped the pieces in the chocolate using tongs, then (gasp) I used my fingers like a double squeegee and scraped the extra chocolate off.  In the interest of kitchen etiquette, I figured I'd better find another way.  This year, seeing as how the pieces were smaller, I dipped them with the tongs, then scraped them off on the edge of the spatula.  It worked great!! 

 

 

Why, you ask, would I scrape off chocolate?  Well, the very first time I ever tried this, I didn't.  That was enough of a lesson for me.  I'm a "more bacon, less chocolate" kinda girl.  If you're the opposite, don't scrape! 

 

After all my bacon bites had been dipped and laid to rest (ha!) I scraped the remaining chocolate out onto the parchment.  Waste not, want not.  And to make things better, I sprinkled it with Epicure's Maple Bacon Sea Salt.  Yeah, that's a winning combo!

 

 

Just to help the chocolate harden, I stuck the tray (parchment, cooling rack, bacon and all) into the fridge.  And voila, the treat is done!