How to Render Bacon

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a really tasty New England Clam Chowder. Bacon tip number one; I threw our bacon in the freezer for a few minutes. I don't want to freeze it; I just want to make it hard, because trying to cut soggy bacon is very, very difficult. All I'm going to do with this is slice it; just a little something like this. You're going to want to move quickly with bacon. If it thaws out, or if it's already soft, it gets really hard to cut. Also, a very sharp knife is very important. Something like that. let's go to the other side here. The reason we're not too concerned about the size of this bacon is we're going to render a lot of the fact out of this bacon. This recipe could also be made without this. You could just substitute olive oil for it instead, or vegetable oil, or even just more butter in the recipe. I like bacon a whole lot, as you can tell by the fact that I'm putting a half a pound of bacon in four quarts of soup. That's your bacon. Like I said, cut it when it's cold. It doesn't matter if it stays in a big clump like this; because it will fall apart in the pan as it heats up. That being said, let's go ahead and do it in the pan, and start sweating our bacon, and get started cooking our soup. We've got our heat on; it's on about seven. We're just going to take our bacon that we just cut up, and throw it right into the pan, pot; whatever, pot, pan; depending on what size item you're using. What we're going to do now is set our timer over here. I'm going to set it for eight minutes. Like I said, I've got my heat on a nice medium high, about a seven or so; if you've got a scale of one to ten. I'm going to put my lid on here, and we're going to let it go for about eight minutes. When we come back, we're going to stir it all up. Then we're going to add our onions and garlic. I can't wait, and I'll see you in eight. "