In Texas is een restaurant waar ik beter niet kan komen, daar frituren ze namelijk spekrepen in deegjasjes...
Zo af en toe zondigen moet kunnen, mits je daar een balansdag (in mijn geval een balansweek) tegenover zet. Maar dit eist een balansjáár...!
Zie ook het filmpje. Ik kwam er spontaan een paar kilo van aan...
Don't try this at home! I gained 5 pounds after reading this...
Would you like double grease with that?
SNOOK, Texas
Occasionally throughout history, a visionary comes along who should be honored for his Herculean efforts in swimming upstream against the tide of political correctness.
Such a man is Frank Sodolak, who is pretty darned sure he invented chicken-fried bacon.
"I ain't never heard of it anywhere else," Sodolak said.
Sodolak, owner of Sodolak's Original Country Inn in this small town (population 489) about 13 miles southwest of College Station -- that's about 100 miles northeast of Austin -- serves the breaded and deep-fried bacon as one of his appetizers. For that totally brown meal, he says some people order it as an appetizer to go with their chicken-fried steak.
"You never know what they're going to order," Sodolak said. He concocted the high-in-vitamin-G (grease) food item eight or 10 years ago.
"I had some bacon one time, and I was just fooling around to see what would happen," he explained.
I'm sure Dr. Frankenstein said about the same thing when he created the monster.
Sodolak makes his chicken-fried bacon by double-dipping uncooked bacon strips in milk and flour. Then he tosses the breaded strips in a Fryolator and nukes them in animal/vegetable oil for three or four minutes. For that final touch, the chicken-fried bacon is served with a bowl of cream gravy. Actually, it tastes pretty good.
"It's crisp, flaky, has a distinct bacon flavor," said American-Statesman food editor Kitty Crider, who sampled part of a to-go order. The stuff travels well in the car. Hey. What's to go bad?
But what I really like about Sodolak's concoction is that it makes the food police crazy.
"I've never heard of anything worse," said Jayne Hurley, senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington D.C., the same bunch of food frumps who warned us about theater popcorn, guacamole and Chinese food.
"They've taken fat, they've doubled-coated it in fat, they've fried it in more fat, and then served it with a side order of fat."
So what's her problem?
At Sodolak's, you get six chicken-fried bacon strips for $3.50. If you ate an order of this stuff every day for a year and you went to the store in a pair of Capri pants, it would look like you were keeping a sack full of gophers prisoner in your underwear.
So how many calories are there in an order of chicken-fried bacon?
"I have no earthly idea," Sodolak said. His restaurant prides itself in its "Texas sized steaks," some of them up to 2½ pounds. The restaurant T-shirt shows a fat cartoon guy patting his stomach and saying, "BURP... I Ate The Whole Thing."
Regardless of what the grocery gendarmes think, Sodolak says his chicken-fried bacon sells pretty well. "It runs in spurts," he said. "One night, we may sell five or six orders, another time 10 orders. Who knows?"
He says the firefighters from the firefighting school at nearby Texas A&M love it.
"They all comment on it; they've never seen nothing like it before," he said.
There would be one way to improve it, however. "The only thing they're missing is a couple of fried eggs under the whole thing," said Hurley, the nutritionist.
That's not a bad idea. That way they could serve it for breakfast.
John Kelso writes for the Austin American-Statesman.
