By Matt Wake  |  Al.com
There’s the Public Enemy Mac & Cheese and The BLT of Curtis Loew. And some of Huntsville food truck I Love Bacon’s menu items even have literally the same exact appellation as the well-known musicians they’re named for, like Tito Jackson (pork belly tacos), Willie Nelson (a tricked-out barbecue sandwich) and Notorious B.I.G (a bacon and mac & cheese sandwich).
The reason? I Love Bacon’s co-owners Josh Patrick and Keith Hill are also electronic dance music DJs, spinning tunes at places like Sammy T’s. “That’s how we met each other 16 years ago,” Patrick, 36, says. “When we get done here on Thursdays, Fridays or Saturdays we go straight to the club, so we wanted everything to have a music connotation because that’s been a big part of our lives.”
I Love Bacon began rolling in mid-April. Patrick and Hill decided on a bacon-themed because it was different than other food truck concepts in this market, it’s Hill’s favorite ingredient and, as Patrick says, “the smell of bacon cooking is something everyone remembers from childhood.”
They went through about a dozen types of bacon before finding the one they wanted to use on their truck. “It’s applewood smoked bacon from a small farm in Tennessee,” Patrick says. “We cook it too a mid-rare. If someone wants it crispier we’ll take it crispier but we don’t want it to ever be overcooked because you taste more of the bacon, the fat, the smoke, at a mid-rare. It’s an expensive ingredient so that’s why our prices are a little higher.”
Check I Love Bacon’s Twitter and Facebook pages for updates on locations, days and times of operation. On a recent August evening, they’re parked outside Yellowhammer Brewing on Clinton Avenue. It’s 103 degrees inside the truck right now.
By day, the Huntsville-based Hill works in IT and Patrick lives in Birmingham where he cooks at fine-dining spot Satterfield’s Restaurant and commutes to the Rocket City a couple times a week. Asked to name three things he typically keeps in his home refrigerator, Patrick says:
“I make all kinds of mustards. There’s nothing else that tastes like a good mustard, especially if you make it yourself and soak the mustard seeds and puree them. I ike to take roasted garlic and jalapenos and standard yellow mustard and a little bit of Dijon and it makes this awesome jalapenos mustard. I like it on anything … any type of sandwich, eggs, omelets.
“The other thing is olives, mainly Kalamata olives but depending on what I’m cooking that week I might pick up some queen olives or maybe some Nicoise, but always olives. I’ll buy a can of smoked salmon and make a lot of Mediterranean salmon salads and stuff like that and that’s what I eat a lot of. So I’ll chop those olives up and put them in there. They’re briny, they’re salty, and so I don’t have to add any extra salt.
“Hoisin sauce. Man, that is the greatest sauce to come out of Asia since sriracha sauce. It’s a plum sauce. I eat a lot of roasted vegetables, so I’ll roast off a lot of broccoli, cauliflower and carrots and then I’ll mix together sriracha and hoisin and make like a super spicy plum-based barbecue sauce, and I’ll dip it in those.”
Read our dining review of I Love Bacon here.
http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/08/post_259.html
