If you’re one of those people who think everything tastes better with bacon, the recent invention of bacon-flavored salt is akin to that of adding cookie dough to ice cream—the theory being that one can never have too much of a good thing.
The brilliance of J&D;’s Bacon Salt is that one can have the flavor of bacon without any of the calories or fat. Thus, eggs, potatoes, pasta, soups, hamburgers, salmon, salads and anything else that can be salted can now be Bacon Salted.
I recently purchased J&D;’s Bacon Salt on the advice of a friend and sprinkled it on a salad composed of lettuce, tomatoes, olives and chopped egg. While my salad did not exactly taste like a Cobb Salad, the bacon flavor decidedly perked up the flavor and made it taste more, well… fun.
Indisputably, there is something both decadent and comforting about bacon, whose aroma can make a house feel like a home on a lazy Sunday morning.
Of course, the problem with bacon has always been that it is fattening. Just one slice of pan-fried pork bacon has three grams of fat, according to nutritiondata.com. In addition, bacon is a messy food to cook and clean up after, making it a rather unpleasant culinary undertaking to cook a few strips of bacon just to add a little extra flavor to a meal.
In contrast, Bacon Salt is neat and tidy; you just sprinkle it from a clean spice jar. It also has a diet-friendly report card compared to that of regular bacon, coming in at zero calories and zero fat grams. Never-the-less, its long list of ingredients including artificial flavors and colors makes Bacon Salt a less than stellar choice from a natural foods perspective. (I was suspicious when I saw that the J&D;’s Bacon Salt official website did not include the product’s ingredients list, figuring the company did not see the ingredients list’s War and Peace length as a marketing plus.)
Just for fun, try reading the Original J&D;’s Bacon Salt’s ingredients list without taking a breath:
Sea salt, dehydrated garlic, paprika, dehydrated onion, corn syrup, bleached enriched flour, monosodium glutamate, spice, corn cereal, maltodextrin, wheat fiber, shortening (includes partially hydrogenated cottonseed and palm oils), natural hickory smoke flavor, silicon dioxide, natural and artificial flavors (contains milk), hydrolized vegetable protein, autolyzed yeast extract, modified food starch, caramel color, smoke flavor, Yellow 6, Red 40, disodium-guanylate, disodium inosinate, ethyl alcohol. Contains wheat soy and milk ingredients.
This Who’s Who of ingredients definitely has some well-known villains, such as MSG, food dyes and partially hydrogenated oils, more popularly known today as the evil trans fats.
While food purists will likely shake their heads in dismay at the artificiality of Bacon Salt, those who enjoy the romance of bacon and are more concerned with obtaining flavor without fat than with ingesting only high quality ingredients may enjoy using the new spice on occasion without wallowing in guilt.
Part of the allure of Bacon Salt is not only its culinary sparkle, but the story behind its creation. Like a romantic comedy in which the two characters destined to fall in love “meet cute,” the story behind Bacon Salt has Hollywood written all over it. One can even imagine Bacon Salt: The Movie, perhaps starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
The two guys behind J&D;’s Bacon Salt, or so the story goes, are Justin and Dave (hence the J&D; in the Bacon Salt name), two supposedly “regular guys” who worked together at a high-tech company and shared a mutual love for bacon, barbecue and watching football on weekends. It was Justin who had the idea for Bacon Salt, but when he shared the idea with Dave a business partnership was forged that turned Justin’s “bacon-flavored dream into a reality.” To make the story even more precious, J&D;’s Bacon Salt initially got off the ground with $5,000 won by Dave’s 3-year-old son on TV’s America‘s Funniest Home Videos.
