How (And Why) To Make A Bacon Weave

Bacon weave! That's right, if you have a kitchen, you can create a woven "blanket" of raw pig candy, drape it over meatloaf, a chicken or turkey or anything else within reason that needs roasting. It can be any size — use a pound of bacon for a chicken-sized blanket.

The official term for this technique is "barding," which means draping or otherwise securing a fatty or cured meat onto another protein like pork tenderloin or fish fillets. The extra layer keeps the interior exceptionally moist, in addition to infusing it with smoky porky flavor. But we once covered a chicken in overlapping slices of salami secured with toothpicks before roasting to prove a point: salami-barded roast chicken is delicious.

Back to the bacon weave. Here's how to do it:

Divide a pack (or two or three) of bacon in half. On a large cutting board, lay one half of the strips out vertically, edges touching. You want to line them up with alternating fat and meat ends (meat touches fat, fat touches meat).

Fold back every other laid-out bacon strip to about two inches from the edge, then lay another bacon strip vertically over the fold-back point and lay the horizontal bacon back over it to form the first part of the weave.

Repeat, alternating  until you have a sheet of woven bacon, then gently lift the whole thing and transfer to your lucky subject.

Too complicated? Come on, it's just like weaving anything else, only with bacon. You've never woven anything? Fine, check out the bacon Wikia's photos for a step-by-step.

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