Originally posted by Sarah – March 18, 2015
I was so excited to see bacon ends in the share and on a mission to render out all of that smokey goodness. If you haven’t used bacon fat in your cooking then you are missing out. Tonight I made a warm cabbage salad using the bacon fat to go along with our Springdell beef tips. Pretty tasty.
I started by chopping the bacon ends and getting them into a pan with low heat. Here is the progression of rendering the bacon ends:
As the process was happening I would occasionally drain the fat into an air tight container that, when finished, will stay in my fridge. Of course I saved some of the goodness for my warm cabbage salad. Cabbage and bacon are a match made in heaven.
To get the salad going I cored the cabbage, the center needs to be removed by cutting around the center piece and popping it out.
You can use a knife or a food processor with a shredding blade to shred half of the head of cabbage. I also added to the pan two carrots that I sliced using a peeler.
Add some bacon fat and get those cooking over low heat, you are wilting the cabbage, not looking for any color on it. After some salt and pepper I took it off the heat and added some chopped chives and caraway seeds. You could really taste the smoky bacon flavor it there, so good.
For my beef I got a nice sear on the meat in a cast iron pan and finished them in the oven. There was a lot of flavor built up in the bottom of the pan so I deglazed it with veal stock I had made earlier this week. A touch of cream and the sauce was velvety and very flavorful.
A pretty quick meal to put together and uses a lot of Springdell goodies. I’m sure most of you found use for your cabbage yesterday but if you have some left, the warm cabbage salad was a great way to go. Enjoy!