I would love to have been in the room when the Sodolaks dreamed up the notion of chicken frying bacon. After all, anyone can fry bacon, but it takes a visionary to chicken-fry Bacon.
The chicken-fried bacon at Sodolak’s Country Inn in Snook, TX is the stuff Texas Legends are made of. And what’s even more shocking than the idea of “Chicken Fried Bacon”, is that its actually good.
Snook, Texas is a small community about 15 miles southwest of College Station. The exterior at Sodolak’s Country Inn is nothing fancy (neither is the interior for that matter).
And if you had any question as to what kind of food Sodolak’s serves, they’ve made it blaringly obvious. Sodolaks is a “STEAK HOUSE”. (no need for subtlety in Snook). But the day I visited I wasn’t on a mission for steak, but for bacon.
The Chicken Fried Bacon is an appetizer consisting of a half dozen or so thinly sliced strips of bacon, battered in Sodolak’s bacon batter, and then deep fried to a golden brown. And as with anything that’s “chicken-fried”, it came with a dipping portion of cream gravy. And there you go…
I expected greasy, fatty bacon, covered in oozing batter dripping with grease. Something like frying fat in more fat and then dipping it into a vat of fat. I told my wife to get the defibrillator ready. Let’s be honest, that’s what you would expect too. However, I was wrong. The chicken fried bacon is surprisingly crisp. I won’t call it “light” but it’s not heavy. The bacon is sliced so thin that it seems like it’s only there to help the batter hold its shape and to give the crunchy batter a nice hint of bacon flavor. The cream gravy only made it tastier.
With the help of my wife, 2 year old son, and Aggie sister and brother-in-law we polished off the plate in no time, and then readied our stomachs for lunch. Ironically, I think the salad put me closer to the grave than the bacon. There’s a salad somewhere under that dressing, I promise.
