Yesterday, I was looking to grab a quick and cheap bite to eat, and remembered that Burger King was featuring their beefy double cheeseburger for a dollar.  Naturally, I thought to myself, “I should go the extra step and ask them to add bacon to it.”  The extra cost was 60 cents, which seemed reasonable for what I thought I’d be getting.

Cure the ominous music here.

The good news: There were five strips of bacon on my double cheeseburger.

The bad news: The strips of bacon were about three inches long and barely half an inch wide.  In fact, had they been much smaller, they probably would have qualified to be called bacon bits.

I ate some of the bacon by itself, and found it to be the most generic, tasteless bacon I’d ever had.  In a blind taste test, I might not have even thought it was bacon, but rather a thin slice from some sort of bland meat stick.

I put the rest of the bacon on the burger and took a few bites.  Predictably, the flavor of the bacon mini-strips was almost completely drowned out by the rest of the sandwich.

Now, I’m sure there’s a good chance that Burger King has two grades of bacon, and saves the better grade for their more expensive, premium burgers.  (After all, even though Wendy’s has introduced a new, thick-sliced applewood bacon for their Bacon Deluxe and Baconator burgers, their original thinner and unspectacular bacon is still being used for their Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers.)  However, I can’t imagine a reasonable explanation for the little laces of bacon I got on my burger.  This wasn’t one of those times when the cook is at the bottom of the pan, and tries to use up what’s left by giving you enough crumbles to make up for the strips you’re not getting; the size of these strips seemed very intentional and purposeful.

I realize that BK probably uses a different grade of bacon on their pricier burgers, but there’s no excuse for giving someone bacon that undermines even the lowest of expectations, even on a burger that only cost a buck to begin with.  McDonald’s and Wendy’s have realized that high-quality ingredients are what attracts today’s discriminating customer, so they’d be smart to devoting more attention to what’s on the customer’s tray and less attention to producing booty-filled hip hop videos for their creepy mascot.

Goodness knows that there’s no shortage of bacon recipes available on the web, but if you want to add to your skills with some in-person experience, the options are not quite as plentiful.  Luckily, we here at the Ministry are looking out for your best interests.

If you live in the Wasington, D.C. metropolitan area — or if you’ll be there for Thanksgiving weekend — recreational cooking school (and wine bar and retail store) Cookology will be offering a whole day of classes on Sunday, November 29th, during which you can learn how to make all sorts of fantastic bacon dishes.  The class schedule and details of each session are as follows:

• Baking Breads with Bacon, 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.: