Food & Drink

$20 buys you all-you-can-eat bacon at this Brooklyn cookoff

"A joke about bacon" — via The Takedowns
Go ham on some ham — via The Takedowns

It’s been a rough couple of years for bacon — the W.H.O. classified everyone’s favorite meat as a Group 1 carcinogen, folks started getting more into pork belly, and bacon apologists like the Brooklyn Bacon Takedown quietly took a leave of absence. Well cheer up, bacon-lovers, because our favorite competitive eaters, the Takedowns, are bringing their great AYCE bacon cook-off back to Brooklyn.

And what are you gonna do, NOT eat all the bacon they make? Yeah, right.

After years away, the amateur cooking competition/all-you-can-eat extravaganza Brooklyn Bacon Takedown is coming back to town. On October 23 from 2-4pm, it’s $20 for all the bacon you can fit in your face at Arrogant Swine (173 Morgan Ave.) in Bushwick. Sounds like a “how much bacon can you eat in two hours” challenge if we’ve ever heard one. And all we can say is, challenge accepted.

IYCMI last time around, the Brooklyn Bacon Takedown is an all-bacon cook-off open to the public. You can either compete as a chef, or just show up to eat a shocking amount of bacon-based dishes until you cannot physically fit anymore pig in your body.

The food is prepared with a caveat à la Iron Chef: each entry much prominently feature the secret ingredient (hint: It’s bacon).

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What's $20 to swim in this for two hours? via Jannik.tka on IG
What’s $20 to swim in this for two hours? via Jannik.tka on IG

If you think you’ve got the know-sow, the pork prowess, the gift of slab required for the challenge, then this is your chance to prove it. Email matt[at]thetakedowns.com to compete. If you’re one of the first 15 contestants, you’ll get nine pounds of meat from Cheshire Pork Heritage Farms (the official “bacon sponsor” of the event) to work with and turn into crispy, salty goodness.

Don’t worry if you’re not much of a chef; they’re expecting at least 15 chefs to take part and your ticket buys you total gorging rights for those two hours, so it ought to be no problem to both get your money’s worth and leave in shame.

Like all great cooking competitions, a panel of judges and an audience vote will determine the winner, which means somebody finally has to listen to your opinion on bacon! At least until the next bacon critic job opens up.

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