The math proves that bacon is the single greatest ingredient

October 18, 2013 by
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 Potato cake with cheese and bacon

Opinions may count a lot, but Wired, working the Food Network, has mathematically proved that bacon is the single greatest ingredient. In Math Proves Bacon is the Miracle Food, they  crunched 49,733 recipes and 906,539 comments to prove that bacon added the greatest benefit of any single ingredient. The only categories that bacon did not work its magic on were pasta and, especially, desserts (sandwiches benefitted the most). They also discovered that unlike low-carb diets and portobello burgers – which reached their popularity in the mid 2000’s – bacon has only increased its poularity over time.

You can find the full details at the article, but in the meantime, we did a little math of our own on the EYB website. We have 29 cookbooks with “bacon” in the title,  (James Villas’ The Bacon Cookbook is the most popular, owned by 54 members), we’ve indexed over 38,000 recipes with bacon as an ingredient, and, of those, 4,774 can be found online. This simple recipe for Potato cake with cheese and bacon (La truffade), from The Country Cooking of France by Anne Willan struck us as a great representative of a much-larger category. Enjoy!

 

Category: Food Online

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4 Comments

  • ellabee  on  October 18, 2013

    :: The only categories that bacon did not work its magic on were pasta ::

    With the important exception of pasta carbonara, which should have guanciale or some bacon-esque ingredient…

  • FuzzyChef  on  October 18, 2013

    On the other hand: potatoes feature in over 71,000 recipes on EYB, showing that potatoes are almost twice as popular as bacon. Cheese in general was five times as popular as bacon, and even parmesan cheese is 50% more popular than bacon. So: lies, damned lies, and bacon.

  • Susan_F  on  October 19, 2013

    FuzzyChef you're mixing your statistics! The article is based on the US Food Network (so US recipes only) and not on EYB which of course has a much wider world view. But equally, it does not look at simply how often bacon appears in recipes, but more importantly, how often the comments on the recipe are positive when bacon is included.

    An interesting experiment – but of course the saying still holds true that there are lies, damned lies … and statistics! I'm sure if you dig hard enough you'll be able to find some statistics which prove the opposite 🙂

  • sir_ken_g  on  October 19, 2013

    Pork lovers unite!
    http://www.nosetotailathome.com/about/

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