During football season, you’ve got all kinds of useful info at your fingertips. Injury stats. Schedules. Where to get curried pig-head dip for the game. Well, actually, you could use a little help there. So here’s a little preview of where you can find the best football-ready applications of pig.
Your spicy, toasty pork rinds: faux (they’re made from tapioca). Your pig head, tossed in a warm, Thai-style curry dip of coconut milk and lots of heat: so, so real. It’s at least enough to get you through the first replay challenge.
Where popcorn and bacon are present, you might think there’d be salt involved, and you’d be right. Here, the salt comes from chopped bacon tossed in with the ’corn, but not before it’s folded with bourbon, caramel and bacon fat. Don’t try this at the movies.
What this is not: an entire head between two pieces of bread (though save that idea for Halloween). What this is: crispy fried slices of pig head, egg-yolk sauce and pickled red onion between two pieces of bread. And lots of them.
It’s salty, it’s puffy, it’s crunchy. It’s fried pigskin, and you’re pretty sure nothing could improve upon it. Unless, of course, it went regional. Which in this case means a healthy dose of Old Bay seasoning. It beats dousing your crab cake in BBQ sauce.
You’re not coming here for the abundance of TVs. You are coming here for the whiskey, the punk rock on the stereo and—once you stake out a barstool by the lone TV—a heaping plate of nachos smothered in liquid cheese and pulled BBQ pork. Dick Butkus would eat this.
