A chef has shared his ‘favourite’ way of cooking bacon that makes it taste ‘even better’. In a YouTube video titled “How Nick DiGiovanni Makes His Perfect Breakfast Sandwich: Every Choice, Every Step,” American chef and TV personality Nick DiGiovanni explains how to cook flavourful bacon that you could eat on its own or in a breakfast sandwich.
Nicholas Channing DiGiovanni has set multiple food-related Guinness World Records. The 29-year-old once worked as a line cook at Waypoint restaurant in Cambridge while attending Harvard.
In the YouTube video, Nicholas begins by recommending that bacon should only be cooked in the oven. He told viewers: “Make sure to never cook your bacon in a pan, it makes a mess, it doesn’t cook evenly.”
He continued: “Do yourself a favour and throw it on a baking tray and stick it in the oven.” The chef, who has more than 25 million followers across social media, said that when he cooks up a breakfast sandwich, he usually uses egg yolk as a sauce, but in this instance, he suggests maple syrup.
“When I’m looking at the sauce in a breakfast sandwich, I want something that’s nice and well-balanced, something with a little bit of acidity, maybe with a few spices that you want in there,” he explained. “I happen to be a purist when it comes to my breakfast sandwiches, and I’m not going to be using a sauce today; instead, maple syrup.”
Demonstrating how he uses maple syrup when cooking bacon, he holds up a tray of cooked bacon and says: “So this bacon is cooked, but it’s missing something.”
He adds: “I’m gonna add a bit of maple syrup to a bowl, then over my bacon”. He goes ahead and brushes some maple syrup over each bacon strip, just enough “so that you get that nice light and shiny coating over the top”.
The next ingredient he uses the ‘season’ is bacon with is sugar. “I’ll also add a nice little pinch of brown sugar,” he said. “Anytime you add sugar to something like this that you’re going to put in the oven or heat, it’s going to caramelise and give that incredible flavour.”
To enhance the flavour of his bacon one step further, the chef then uses one fruit many probably wouldn’t ever think of adding to bacon. “To finish, one of my favourite ingredients to use when cooking is just a little bit of lemon zest,” Nick says. “This will give a little bit of acidity.”
Towards the end of the video, he shows viewers a side-by-side comparison of plain cooked bacon and cooked bacon with maple syrup, brown sugar and lemon zest on top. “Check out the difference between this normal bacon that I’ve cooked without anything on top and then this one over here, which has that maple glaze on top with a little bit of brown sugar and lemon zest,” he said.
“This maple-glazed bacon is just so much better looking, so much more flavourful. Don’t get me wrong, regular bacon is good, but this is better.”
