Add Millionaire's Bacon To Your Breakfast Menu For A Touch Of Luxury
If you're looking for a way to make your breakfast just a bit more luxurious, then you need to know about millionaire's bacon, which certainly lives up to its lavish-sounding name. Millionaire's bacon is the perfect combination of salty, sweet, and spicy — and is essentially the next step up from candied bacon.
While candied bacon usually consists of just bacon and either brown sugar or maple syrup, millionaire's bacon — which seems to have originated at a restaurant called Sweet Maple in San Francisco and was showcased on "United States of Bacon" on Discovery Network — is a bit more complex. The main difference is that millionaire's bacon adds a spicy element to balance the sweetness and provide more depth of flavor.
At its simplest, a typical millionaire's bacon recipe consists of thick-cut bacon, brown sugar, cayenne, red pepper, and black pepper — this is how they make it at Sweet Maple. Additionally, many other recipes use maple syrup along with brown sugar. You'll want to use thick-cut bacon, specifically, because a thinner variety will burn much more quickly. If all you have is a thin cut, go ahead and use it, but just be sure to keep an eye on it while baking. After combining the ingredients and brushing the mixture over the bacon, bake in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes, flipping halfway.
Customize millionaire's bacon to your liking
There are so many different ways to make millionaire's bacon — really, the only guidelines you need to stick to are to ensure that it has both sweetness and spiciness (along with the saltiness from the bacon itself). As mentioned above, you can choose between brown sugar and maple syrup or use both. Honey is also another option for the sweet element, either on its own or in combination with brown sugar.
There is also plenty of room to experiment with the spicy element. Along with (or instead of) cayenne and paprika, you could integrate spices like chipotle pepper or chili pepper. Some variations include mixing gochujang (a Korean red chili paste) with maple syrup and brown sugar. You also have total control over the sweet-to-spicy ratio. If you have a low spice tolerance, then you can add a touch of cayenne pepper. Or, if you love extra spicy food, you can go all out with a combination of gochujang, cayenne, and other spices.
Once you've perfected your version of millionaire's bacon, all that's left to do is figure out which other breakfast items you want to pair it with. Really, it makes the perfect combination for either a savory breakfast plate, with something like scrambled eggs and hash browns, or on the side of something sweet, like a stack of pancakes.