You Should Seriously Start Frying Your Breakfast Potatoes In Bacon Grease
There may be some people who don't love breakfast food, but for many, the morning meal is one of life's greatest small joys. A classic feast of eggs, bacon, potatoes, and toast will likely bring a smile to any non-vegetarian's face. But there's a way to up your breakfast game without adding any new ingredients to the process, and frankly, simplifying it: Cook your potatoes in the leftover bacon grease.
There are all sorts of tricks to enjoying breakfast (you should use the best type of potatoes, you can eat it at any time of day and nobody can stop you), but this one relies on simply reusing a product you already have. If you cook your bacon first, then add your potatoes and onions to the leftover drippings, the grease will imbue that rich, bacon-y flavor into the vegetables, punching them up to a degree that will surprise you if you've never tried it. It's a technique favored by pros like chef John Currence, who uses the smoky fat to crisp up the hashbrowns featured in his Low Country cast-iron skillet scramble, a dish from his book "Big Bad Breakfast: The Most Important Book of the Day."
Bacon grease is great with potatoes, and pretty much everything else
You can fry bacon and cook your potatoes in the leftover grease, but maybe you're worried about the bacon getting cold. In that case, you can just keep a small container of bacon grease on hand. The latter method will open up entirely new culinary avenues because here's the thing — you can cook all sorts of foods in bacon grease. Bacon grease is ultimately just a form of cooking fat, and as such, it serves the same purpose as butter, ghee, or oil.
As such, anything you can fry or roast in those other fats, you can cook in bacon grease if you want it to take on the rich, savory flavor of preserved pork. Vegetables work well; bacon and Brussels sprouts are a classic combination, after all. It's fantastic as a replacement for butter or mayo when making a grilled cheese (just make sure it's solidified before spreading on the bread). Using bacon grease instead of oil for stovetop popcorn will take your moviegoing experience to a different dimension. And breakfast potatoes aren't even the only food that excels when cooked in your leftover grease: Scrambled or fried eggs are an A+ move, too. If you do choose to keep some bacon fat on hand, there are a few things to remember when storing it for later use.
Storing bacon grease properly
The only tricky part with bacon grease — aside from using it up too quickly — is knowing how to store it. You can't pour the grease directly into a plastic container in its hot liquid form, or it's likely to melt or warp the vessel. It's also just more difficult to dump it that way; if you've ever been burned by a splatter of hot bacon grease, chances are good you have absolutely no desire to do so again. Wait for it to cool (either in liquid form or after it solidifies), then pour or scrape it into the container. Pop it in your fridge, and it lasts way, way longer than you might expect: When refrigerated, bacon grease will last around three months and indefinitely in the freezer.
People often talk about how to mitigate food waste from things going bad, but there's another side to that, too. By reusing your bacon grease in other foods, you are not only keeping it from winding up in a landfill somewhere, but you're improving your cooking skills by using all the tools at your disposal. If you save your bacon grease, you can feel good about doing so and have a great meal at the same time.