Orange “Bacon” “Jerky”

Lots of quotation marks up there!

My friend Lucelle came over recently bearing a beautiful jar of homemade orange marmalade, made mostly with blood oranges. My first thought was a dish I made frequently in Japan, because of the ubiquity of very, very thinly sliced pork loin, sliced that way for sukiyaki or shabu shabu. My guess is that the pork is frozen first and then thinly sliced with a deli-style meat slicer. My favorite thing to do with it was to put about a half pound in a bowl, add some olive oil and a good glop of orange marmalade, gently mix, and lay them out on a cookie sheet (lined with parchment or a silpat) and roast the living hell out of them at 550 (broiling is also an option). The sugars of the marmalade caramelize pretty quickly (maybe five minutes), and infuse themselves, along with the small amount of fat on the pork, into porciney orangey nirvana, especially when dusted with tangerine salt and plenty of good black pepper at the end.

So the next time I found myself in Nijiya, in Japantown (SF), I picked up a half-pound. Other Japanese grocers carry this particular cut of pork, but I’ve never seen it anywhere else. One could, of course, purchase a whole loin just about anywhere, half-freeze it, and, with a very sharp knife, practice one’s slicing skills. It might even be benriner-able at the right degree of freeze, though I’m not sure. You can always ask a friendly local butcher to slice it up for you, too.

• 2 tablespoons good orange marmalade
• fruity olive oil
• 1/2 lb. or so pork loin, sliced extremely thinly, as in sukiyaki
• fresh, coarsely ground black peppercorns
• tangerine salt

This is about as “instant” a food as it’s possible to get, taking about as much time as it takes to make a pot of tea. They’re good at room temperature, too. It’s not really bacon and not really jerky, but it does taste like a cross between the two. Whatever we wish to call it, it’s guaranteed to disappear quickly at parties!