There’s something special about a trainwreck. And I don’t mean some bastardized reality-show definition of the word, I mean when somebody’s spent a lot of money - or better, a lot of time - only to find out their work was a colossal fuckup. So several months back when I saw a post on MeFi talking about bacon lollipops, I had to at least look.
(I know, I should have had this posted a month ago. but I’m also lazy.)
I’m a big fat guy. If you ask a guy if he likes bacon, odds are good he’ll say yes. But ask a fat guy if he likes bacon, and he will always say yes - if he doesn’t he’s lying. So bacon in any context is intriguing. Plus the potential for trainwreck is extraordinarily high. Like Campbell’s french onion soup huge. Ultraviolet huge. All these things together meant I had to spend money testing this shit out.
So I headed over to lollyphile, where they make specialty lollipops. Currently, they only have two flavors: absinthe and maple-bacon. After reading their description (”The salty chunks of bacon make a delicious and unique counterpoint to the subtle sweetness of the maple…”) I had to try some. They don’t come cheap: I opted for the 4-suckers box. $2.50 a sucker. Eh, fuck it, I figured; it’s only money.
I kept an eye on the site, and after being featured on MeFi and passed around the Net, their supply sold out pretty damn quick. I was glad I got my order in when I did.
A few days later, in my mailbox appeared a cardboard box, occupied by four maple-bacon lollipops. I wanted to wait a few days before trying anything that epic. Finally the moment came one weekend day, when I was sitting around watching a movie, so I opened one of the carefully-wrapped lollipops and tasted it.
My first taste was rather underwhelming. But as the lolly melted, I started to really get into the simple, light flavor of the maple. However, after you get a few minutes into one of these motherbitches, you start to run into these wonderful salty, smoky bacon bits, and biting down on one of them along with the smooth maple flavor is a really compelling experience. The bacon pieces taste amazingly good; how much of this is actuality and how much of this is the really compelling description that Lollyphile wrote regarding the quality of their ingredients remains to be seen.
Likely the first thing you notice, other than the actual eating of the product, is that the texture varies pretty dramatically between lollipops, depending on the size and quantity of bacon pieces that ended up in each one. This is probably the single most intriguing thing about the whole experience; there’s absolutely nothing at all mass-produced about these suckers. The size varies pretty dramatically too; some are thin, some thicker. If you’ve got an obsessive-compulsive streak like me, you’ll find yourself pulling all of them out of the box and trying to come up with some sort of ranking system that combines both the thickness, amount of bacon and size of pieces so that you can set aside the one that best meets the criteria for the ideal specimen so you can eat that one last.
Yeah, I’m aware that I have problems.
The second thing you notice is the ingredients list printed on each sucker: sugar, corn syrup, maple syrup, bacon, cream of tartar. That’s pretty damn straightforward. While you’re noticing things you’ll also notice that these things have an expiration date; yes, it’s cooked, unrefrigerated bacon, and it has an expiration date. While I haven’t seen an official reference, you’ll probably have somewhere around a month to eat your maple-bacon lollipops before you have to worry about whatever evil unrefrigerated bacon diseases that exist.
So, having eaten my way through a few of these things, I can say this without reservation: these things are fucking wicked rad. They’re kinda pricey; so much so that a box of 12 of them costs more than buying a whole box of Tootsie Pops at Costco. But they’re unique enough that when the chance came to order more, I ordered a box of 12, and am currently enjoying another one right now.
