Year's Best: Recipes with Bacon

The burger at Tyler Florence's Wayfare Tavern in San Francisco is called Le Grand with good reason: It's a custom blend of ground prime rib, brisket, skirt steak and tenderloin, topped with Nueske's bacon and Cowgirl Creamery's triple-cream Mt. Tam cheese. The recipe is also delicious with a mix of chuck and sirloin.

This is a brilliant marriage of two classics: cornmeal-dusted green tomatoes and a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.

This salad manages to seem both light and rich. Sheamus Feeley makes it with creamy chunks of Point Reyes Blue Cheese and crisp house-cured bacon, but the salad has such great zing, vegetarians will be equally happy with a bacon-free version.

As with any sweet glaze, brush the honey-horseradish-mustard sauce on the salmon in the last minutes of grilling, or else the sugars in it might burn. Pairing Suggestion: A fresh, cherry-scented Grenache rosé.

The F&W Test Kitchen's terrific glazed salmon is phenomenal both on its own and as part of this this brilliant breakfast recipe riff.

For a robust take on the Indonesian fried rice dish nasi goreng, Sang Yoon stir-fries black rice, sometimes called forbidden rice, with bacon and roasted garlic. "You can make it with short-grain brown rice, but you'd miss a lot of the fun," Sang Yoon says.

This breakfast bake topped with runny eggs by F&W's Grace Parisi develops a terrific texture as it cooks slowly in a glass dish (which makes it easy to see when the bottom is perfectly browned). As one F&W editor remarked on tasting it, "I worship the crisp bottom and the chewy, moist bread."

Chris Kronner, chef at Bar Tartine in San Francisco, sautés guinea hens in bacon fat, then roasts them in a wood-burning oven; he serves them with vegetables braised in whatever Scribe red wine is on hand.

This is Grace Parisi's sophisticated version of magic bars, that chocolate-coconut bake-sale favorite. Browning the butter gives the crust a nutty flavor; cooking it in a metal baking dish makes it extra crisp. In a touch inspired by pastry chefs' favorite new ingredient, Grace adds bacon to the filling.