Bacon, Tomato, Polenta

This dish is so old school and I love that

Stick to the ribs, big smooch and wiping the lipstick off your cheek because this one feels like it came from someone’s grandma. Some solid bits of cooking, nothing too crazy baby.

Bacon glazed in tangelo juice, tomato concasse salad, and creamy polenta so good some guy on IG saying it might just save his marriage.

I went to Whole Foods and saw that they had all these meaty bacon ends on sale so I had to snag them. This inspired the dish but at the time I didn’t know it.

I’ve been reading all these old French cookbooks. One is a an English translation of a book written in the mid 1800’s - French Cookery by Marie-Antonin Careme. Careme was the first celebrity chef recorded in history these recipes are so old the modern day translations don’t really have meaning. I find it so fascinating reading excerpts where he uses ingredients such as Pheasant Gelee for a sauce to go over roasted pheasant. It warms my soul knowing that these cooks even had the understanding of this technique.

What he means with Pheasant Gelee is just a really gelatinous stock (could be beef,chicken, pork etc) that has been chilled and cut into cubes. This broth is so rich in collagen that it is just considered gelee. No added gelatin.

French Cookery by Marie-Antonin Careme

The other Book I’ve been reading is the cooking bible - A guide to modern cookery by Auguste Escoffier. This man came after Careme’s emergence in France. If anything you could argue Careme influenced the likes of cooks in Escoffier’s era- but it would be Escoffier who published this book and completely changing the standard of French cooking. He implemented a militant approach to the kitchen, keeping clean and shaved, chef whites, being presentable outside of work and most importantly following his brigade system. If you've watched the bear you’ve heard about this brigade system and it’s still used today. The guide to modern cookery is still relevant and if anything is more important now than ever. In an era of trends and Tik Tok chefs this food is full of technique.

My chef in culinary school who taught us French Cuisine said to us on Day 1 - “If you can cook through this book and know how to make these recipes, you are an exceptional cook.” I knew this would be the standard.

A guide to modern cookery by Auguste Escoffier

This dish feels like something these two would be proud of—humble, but with a little extra care in the form of tomato concassé, a technique you hardly see anymore. In culinary school, it was everywhere, like they were trying to drill it into our DNA. Now? It’s practically a lost art, ignored by the hipster crowd. But in the recipe below, we treat the tomato the way it deserves—delicately, beautifully.

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