Millionaire’s Bacon will change your breakfast and your life

Bacon is the best element of any cooked breakfast. There, that’s a pretty uncontroversial statement, right?

Even the British public, notorious for their bad food opinions, couldn’t get that one wrong.

Okay, but what if we told you there was a way to make bacon better. No, not this new method for cooking bacon - something even better than that.

Impossible, you might be thinking. It has that perfect blend of saltiness and crispiness, and complements every other aspect of a fry-up. In fact, just reading this, you’re beginning to regret having cereal at your desk this morning.

But before you run to the greasy spoon next to the office to see if you can sneak in before the 10am rush, let us tell you about something that just might be even better: ‘Millionaire’s Bacon’.

Just look at that, would you.

Putting ‘Millionaire’s’ in front of something is normally a good sign, right?

When you do the same with the word ‘shortbread’, you’re getting the same amount of shortbread topped with caramel and chocolate, and the bacon equivalent also adds a bunch of sugar into the equation.

Thick-cut, slow-cooked and sugar-coated, it’s the sort of thing you can probably try once before lapsing into a glorious food coma until you wake up in time for seconds.

San Francisco brunch spot Sweet Maple is one of the restaurants pioneering the creation, and it looks almost pornographic.

“But don’t we already have this? Isn’t it just ‘candied’ bacon?” I hear you ask.

No. Wash your mouth out.

Sweet Maple co-owner Hoyul Steven Choi told SFGate the slices are approximately half an inch thick – by comparison, American bacon is normally 1/16 of an inch thick, while British cafes normally use slightly thicker slices, but still nothing close to Sweet Maple’s offering.

Before cooking, the slices are drenched in sugar and cayenne pepper, then into the oven they go for a few hours.

The end product is sticky, tender, and photogenic enough to knock all that avocado toast off the top of your Instagram feed.

Sweet Maple charges $8 for a side of Millionaire’s Bacon, or half that amount to substitute it in for another item in your breakfast or brunch.

According to SFGate, some other restaurants in the area charge up to $14 for two slices of the stuff, though often it will come with extras like asparagus included.

Now, sometimes you’ll only be content with two or three greasy rashers of bacon in between a couple of slices of cheap white bread. No one’s judging you for that – you’re only human.

However, if you find yourself in the land of Silicon Valley millionaires, why wouldn’t you try living like one, if just for a morning?

(Images: iStock/Sweet Maple)