Balsamic Bacon Jam

Over the holidays, my pallet had the wonderful experience of tasting bacon jam. At first bite, my senses were in overload! Where had this wonderful, salty, sweet, bacony concoction been all my life? My mother in law made it following a Martha Stewart recipe. I wanted to tweak the recipe a bit, to make it my own, based on my own taste. The following post is about my venture into making this glorious spread!

To make bacon jam you need a few things:
A deep, heavy bottomed pot. I used my cast iron Dutch Oven.
2 lbs of good thick bacon, like Wrights
2/3 cup Balsamic vinegar
2 medium onions, chopped fine
2 or 3 tbsp minced garlic
2/3  cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sorghum or molasses, or combo of both
1/2 to 1 cup liquid, such as water or leftover coffee
dash salt, few red pepper flakes, optional





Begin by taking out about 7 slices of bacon at at time. Cut in half, then, cut in half long ways. Then begin to dice. Heat your pot on medium heat, while starting to dice. Add your bacon. Continue until you've diced 2 lbs. Cook bacon until crisp.Takes about 7 to 10 minutes. You can dice your onion during this time. Remove from pot, with slotted spoon. Drain all but a couple tablespoons of bacon drippings, save for later.

Lower temp to medium low and add your diced onion. I used my mini food processor to get a fine dice. Add your dash of salt now and red pepper flakes. Stir occasionally. Once they begin to caramelize, add your garlic. Stir often. Add some liquid if you need to.

Once onions and garlic are beautifully caramelized, add the remaining liquid, vinegar, sugar, and sorghum. Bring to low boil on medium heat. Add your diced bacon. Stir well. At this point, I tasted the concoction. It needed a bit more vinegar. I added about 1/4 cup cider vinegar to give it more bite. The balsamic, once reduced, gets very sweet. Lower temp to simmer, cover.

Cook about 2 to 3 hours, until most liquid is cooked out. Remove to a glass bowl, let come to room temp, then cover and store in the fridge over night. The next morning, Add the jam to your large food processor. Pulse a few times, until its a smoother texture with a little chunk to it.

Serve any way you'd like! We ate it on crackers, crusty baguette, and cheeseburgers. I even added a dollop to our canned baked beans while heating them last night. It will keep at least 2 weeks in the fridge.

A few lessons I learned. 1. Don't make this in an all cast iron Dutch oven, unless its very well seasoned. It stripped the new seasoning off my Dutch Oven. I'll use my enamel one next time.
Some recipes, including Martha Stewart's, say to cook on low for 4 hours in the crock pot.  Lesson 2, crack a window! It WILL make your house have an odd smell. Yummy bacon mixed with vinegar. So crack a window if you must. If you'd like to use cider vinegar, I'd up the sugar by a couple tbsp to 1/4 cup. You can use coconut sugar in place of brown sugar and add honey instead of sorghum.