N00bcakes has declared this week to be Bacon Week, dishing out an interesting and delicious bacon recipe everyday this week. She has invited the rest of us to get in on the action as well. To which I said, “An excuse to make new and exciting things with bacon? %#!% yeah!” You can quote me on that, in fact.

Check out this sweet bacon badge (Pssssst, I made it)!

I am kicking this extravaganza off with (in my mind) my most exciting bacon endeavor for the week: bacon-infused alcohols. Ah, the combination of two of my great loves. Durrlicious.

Where to start? There are a TON of recipes for bacon-infused vodka on the interwebz (the bacon meme that peaked in 2009 is mostly to blame), but I didn’t really like the looks of any of them. I have infused vodka before (all flavors of skittles and fruit vodkas – apple vanilla and strawberry-pineapple), and while the time frames and methods I read varied widely, none of them really struck me as being the best way. So it is official: I am winging it!

This is your pan on bacon.

We started by cooking up the bacon.

Then we poured the grease half and half into two jars and added the bacon. One thing I read on the internet that is did listen to was the advice against using plastic jars for this endeavor.

Since bacon-infused vodka has been done so often and can even be bought commercially, I wanted to try something different as well.

So I broke out the cognac. I could find only one back-handed reference to bacon-infused brandy online – and certainly not cognac. Because cognac is supposed to be good – it’s expensive and fancy-shmancy. This is perfect way to do something different without breaking the bank because, this is in fact, not fancy-shmancy cognac – it’s actually not good at all. I am excited about this venture because it takes unpleasantly cheap cognac (seriously I don’t recommend this brand for your money) and gives it the chance to greasily transcend its humble beginnings and perhaps become something actually enjoyable. We shall see!

What could be more deliciously southern than bacon, booze and mason jars?

So I shook up the jars and will now leave them in a dark cabinet for a couple days. This goes against my food-paranoid ways, but seriously its straight liquor – it’s definitely going to be preserved for the short time it will infuse. As to the length of that time… well, your guess is as good as mine. Recipes I read suggested periods as short as 24 hours (and explicitly not more than 72) and others as long as three to four weeks. I am going to give it a day or two and take a teeny, tiny, greasy taste. And keep doing that until I think it’s done. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh. My.