Posts tagged cooking

When you want to publicize a recipe, it sure doesn't hurt to have 1,200 followers on Twitter. But the creation of this cultural good still started with the three. (I use the phrase "cultural good" loosely. Vegetarians, and even moderate carnivores like me, will want to avert their eyes from the photos of the Bacon Explosion under construction.)

re: 3 12 120, bacon, cooking, food, social media, twitter

Andy:

Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed — and greatly accelerated — the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.

The Bacon Explosion was born shortly before Christmas in Roeland Park, Kan., in Jason Day’s kitchen. He and Aaron Chronister, who anchor a barbecue team called Burnt Finger BBQ, were discussing a challenge from a bacon lover they received on their Twitter text-messaging service: What could the barbecuers do with bacon? . . .

Mr. Chronister explained that the Bacon Explosion “got so much traction on the Web because it seems so over the top.” But Mr. Chronister, an Internet marketer from Kansas City, Mo., did what he could to help it along. He first used Twitter to send short text messages about the recipe to his 1,200 Twitter followers, many of them fellow Internet marketers with extensive social networks. He also posted links on social networking sites. “I used a lot of my connections to get it out there and to push it,” he said.

I just learned recently that Kellogg's Rice Krispies cereal is sold in Australia under the name Rice Bubbles—which reminded me of this description I'd read a while ago of a traditional Bangladeshi technique for making puffed rice.

re: breakfast, cooking, food and drink, parallels

Nate:

Joygun Nessa’s life revolves around rice: she eats it; her family raises it on their farm; and it supplies her with a livelihood: making muri (puffed rice).

Rice and salt and sand—as a medium for puffing the rice—are all she needs. Ms. Nessa, however, does not use just any old rice. She recommends IR8 developed by IRRI or BR11 for the best results.

To prepare her specialty, she uses a clay stove in which the fire is underground. It uses one-third less fuel than other stoves, which is important in a country suffering from fuel shortage. She has been using the stove for about 7 years.

Squatting by the stove, she stokes the fire by throwing fistfuls of wheat straw down the stove’s holes. Sometimes she uses balls of cow dung, rice hull, and sticks for fuel. The heat produced is intense.
Over one of the holes, she heats up a large clay pot with sand in it. Rice in salted water is warmed in a small pot over a different hole. She stirs the rice with a naruni, a utensil made of palm-midribs bunched together.

When the right temperature is reached, she skillfully pours the rice into the big pot with the sand and swirls it for 30 seconds. Suddenly, the rice becomes alive in a burst of steam and fills the pot.

Ms. Nessa knows exactly when the rice is done puffing. If she hesitates a moment too long, the rice will burn. With the precision of a master chef, she dumps the contents into a clay strainer and shakes out the sand.

The muri is warm and mildly salty, with a nutty taste. She makes it every day so that it’s fresh for her customers and family.

She markets the muri in bulk and in small plastic bags at the family’s grocery store. From 40 kilograms of rough rice, she gets about 26 kilograms of muri.