Sweet, smokey and savory. Follow this recipe to make a dessert your guests are sure to remember.

Do you like Ice Cream? How about bacon? If you’re anything like me you answered “yes” and “hells yes!”, respectively. This is an idea I’ve been floating around in my head for quite some time now, and I finally decided to test it out.

Ice cream is a favorite of mine, and a couple of years ago some friends gave me an ice cream maker for my birthday. At the time I placed the gift in my basement storage closet and promptly forgot about its existence until about two months ago when my wife asked me to throw it out. Let’s just say I’ve been experimenting with homemade ice cream a lot lately!

At any rate, once I started testing different ice cream recipes I discovered that the simplest were the best, and that the best recipes comprised of little more than cream, whole milk, and sugar – in other words, fat and sugar. Who would have thought?

I originally thought I would make this a maple bacon ice cream (using maple instead of vanilla extract, and regular sugar instead of brown sugar in the ice cream), but decided that the maple might have been a little overpowering. Instead I opted to use maple when I made the Pig Candy.

What is Pig Candy you ask? Well, it’s a ridiculously simple and tasty treat that many bbq-nuts (such as myself) have been making for years. You simply season bacon with a lot of sugar (in this case maple syrup and brown sugar) and cook it until it is crisp. In the end you simply have candied bacon.

You can cook the bacon any number of ways, heck you could even bake it in your oven, but were would be the fun in that? For this recipe I cooked my bacon on my Weber Performer with Kingsford original charcoal. I also added one chunk of hickory wood for added flavor.

You’re going to want to make sure the bacon is cooked “crispy”, otherwise it will be chewy when added to the ice cream.

Pig Candy Ice Cream (aka Bacon Ice Cream)

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

Total Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Ingredients

For the Pig Candy:

8 slices of bacon
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbsp maple syrup

For the Ice Cream:

2 cups heavy cream
1 1/2 cups whole milk
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp vanilla extract
pinch salt

Instructions

Prepare your grill or smoker for two-zone indirect cooking. Preheat grill or smoker to 250°F.
While grill is preheating, lay out bacon on baking sheet - use Frog Mats if you have them.
Baste bacon on side with maple syrup and place brown sugar on top. Smear with your fingertips to create a paste on bacon.
Turn over bacon strips are repeat.
Place bacon on grill and cook for approx. one hour, until bacon has crisped. Check bacon every 15 minutes to make sure the sugar does not burn.
Once bacon is crispy, remove and let cool.
To prepare the custard for the ice cream, combine the: cream, milk, brown sugar, vanilla extract, and the pinch of salt. Whisk until the sugar has dissolved and chill for at least two hours.
Once the custard has chilled, prepare your ice cream maker and mix as per instructions.
In the last five minutes of mixing ice cream in the maker, crumble and add pig candy.
Move ice cream into an air tight container and freeze for at least one hour.
Serve and enjoy!