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Pork licks are a sweet and savory delicacy made with bacon, chocolate, and sea salt. The dish has a long history of combining sweet and savory flavors, and variations include maple syrup-coated bacon and bacon chocolate chip cookies. Quality ingredients are key, and the dish can be made with high-quality bacon and dark chocolate. Pork licks were popularized at the Minnesota State Fair in 2008, but their origin is unclear. A potential variation is pepperoni spiced pork lick, which would combine chocolate and chili.
Pork licks are delicacies covered in bacon cooked in chocolate and then garnished with sea salt chunks, although some cooks leave the sea salt off. While this combination of foods may give some readers room for pause, it’s actually backed by a long history of combining sweet and savory foods. In Mexico, for example, chocolate mole sauces are used to flavor chicken and pork dishes in some regions, and France’s famous fleur de sel caramels is made by dusting caramel with sea salt.
The flavor combination in pork licks combines sweet, salty, and umami, or savory, in one bite. Ideally, a cross section should be partly crunchy, from the bacon and salt, and partly soft, as the chocolate begins to melt in your mouth. The combination of sweet and savory can be quite distinctive, especially when paired with the salty nature of bacon. Variations on the pork licks include bacon covered in a candy maple syrup coating and bacon chocolate chip cookies, which include bacon bits cooked in a classic chocolate chip cookie dough.
This food can vary widely in quality, depending on the basic ingredients. Higher-quality bacon will produce a more complex and interesting center layer, and many cooks like to use high-quality dark chocolate that goes light on the sugar so the sweet notes aren’t overwhelming. However, milk chocolate can also be used, adding a creamier texture to the finished piece. The salt chunks can be substituted for lighter salt flakes or left out altogether, for folks who find classic pork licks a little too salty.
This food was popularized in 2008 when it was heavily promoted at the Minnesota State Fair, but in fact, numerous versions of pork licks were already floating around the culinary world, including bacon bonbons. The dish isn’t native to the Midwest either, and the origin of the chocolate/bacon/salt combination is actually a bit hard to trace. The dish may have started out as a wild culinary experiment or dare somewhere, but gourmet chefs quickly picked up on it and played with the recipe to create their own unique approach.
This wise author of EKEK is interested to see if some daring cooks take the next obvious step and make pepperoni spiced pork lick, since chocolate and chili is already a time-tested combination. This variation is most likely emerging in Texas, where several chocolate companies already produce an assortment of chili and chocolate mixes.
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