This Old School Bacon Lovers' Salad Dressing Deserves A Comeback (And Honestly Should Have Never Left)

If you were online during the 2010s, you might remember when bacon — one of many decidedly delicious pig proteins — was a whole meme. During this particularly grating internet era, anything good could be called "epic bacon," and a dish could be praised with "because bacon" without any nuanced discussion of its culinary merits. For a moment, combo foods like bacon cupcakes — backed by science, but still questionable — seemed close to entering the mainstream. Liking bacon had almost become a kind of shortcut to having a personality. But if you look back even further into the grease-slicked crystal ball, excellent bacon preparations like hot bacon dressing actually paved the way for all of that pork excitement, and now enough time has passed since that rasher-saturated frenzy of the 2010s to bring it back.

Although it is one of many throwback dressings that hardly anyone eats anymore, hot bacon dressing is a particularly delicious one and thus worth a revisit. Conceptually similar a salade Lyonnaise's lardon dressing, hot bacon dressing purportedly originated in Pennsylvania Dutch communities who largely settled in the United States from Germany (which also accounts for its inclusion in the latter nation's titular potato salad). The bacon grease that's all too often cast aside is actually a crucial ingredient here, imbuing the condiment with its rich, silken texture and smoky saltiness. And the finished product is more or less exactly what it sounds like; the mere notion of a warm, salty, crispy, swine-packed dressing over dishes like crisp greens and perky tomatoes is very appetizing indeed. 

If you go looking for a hot bacon dressing recipe, you'll find that there's a world of variations out there. Although creativity is always welcome, it's best to make a dressing fairly close to the basic, agreed-upon version on your first attempt. It will help you figure out what elements you want to keep, which ones you'd rather leave, and what would be great to add. You will find a fair number of hot bacon dressings call for combining the bacon and grease with an acid, a sweetener, seasonings, and maybe a smattering of alliums to reach the right taste and texture. Beyond that, hot bacon dressing also aims for a smooth finish, and some recipes rely on emulsifiers like eggs (whisked vigorously into mix). 

If these ingredients sound familiar, it's because these are also the elements of a lot of salad dressings, but in this meat-lovers adaptation, you cook the bacon to render its smoky fat, using it as the base of your dressing (instead of olive or some other oil as you would in other dressings). From there the bacon is removed and crumbled on the side while the other ingredients are stirred into the rendered fat. Once the sauce has thickened and warmed you can add it (and the crumbled bacon) to any salad you make. Top a Niçoise, cloak a Cobb, or use your hot bacon dressing to turn your garden-variety garden salad into something just a little more special.