Chef Michael Hogan doesn’t strive to be in the spotlight for the fame, fortune and notoriety that some of today’s high-profile, flamboyant and flashy celebrity chefs aspire to achieve. However, he is laser focused on continuing his culinary quest to compete and win on a global stage and is recognized as one of the world’s best chefs, using bacon as his canvas at the annual World Food Championships (WFC). In early August, Hogan was gearing up for his eighth appearance in the competition, one of up to 20 entrants who qualified in the Bacon category. The 2024 competition will be held Nov. 8-12 in Indianapolis. Having won sixth place in bacon in 2022 and fourth in 2023, Hogan was gunning for a blue ribbon in bacon this year.

It’s easy to root for the humble, soft-spoken Hogan, whose passion for cooking was inspired by his mother. His first job in the food industry was washing dishes at a Big Boy burger restaurant as a kid, where he eventually was promoted to a cooking position.

His fire for competitive cooking was literally ignited after his then-wife bought him a modest patio smoker about 12 years ago and he began experimenting with slow-cooked meat as a hobby. While honing his backyard cooking skills Hogan became interested in the growing number of competitive barbecue events in Omaha and across the country. To learn more about competitive barbecue cookoffs, he decided to become a Kansas City Barbeque Society certified judge in 2012. He went on to enter his first contest on Labor Day weekend in 2013, held in the Omaha area. The experience was humbling and made him realize how much there was to learn. Not winning made him more determined. By the following year, his team, Spice Your Life Rub Your Meat, which included Hogan and his two children, competed in multiple barbecue cookoffs, and he recalled that was when the team finally did well enough to win some ribbons and part of the cash purse at a contest in Omaha. The barbecue team was the most successful in 2014, collecting multiple ribbons, trophies and cash prizes in competitions along the way.

Soon he discovered the opportunities to compete in the growing number of bacon-related festivals across the country and around the world. Hogan began focusing on competitions affiliated with those events. He went on to win the Omaha Beer and Bacon Festival twice and he came out on top two times at the Culinary Fight Club competition.

In 2019, he also cooked the winning steak at Omaha’s Septemberfest BBQ & Ribeye Steak Cookoff Challenge. Winning in qualifying local competitions has allowed Hogan’s team to compete in the annual World Food Championships each year, starting in 2016 (not including 2020 when it was canceled due to the pandemic). He recalled his entry at that year’s Omaha Beer and Bacon Festival was a pork belly taco with a jalapeno lime slaw, which qualified him for the WFC for the first time. That got him an invite to the 2016 WFC, which was then held in Orange Beach, Ala.

“I went down there in 2016, and I got my butt whooped,” he said. “So, I keep going back. I want that first place. I never give up.”

The next year Hogan qualified for the WFC by winning first place at the same bacon festival with a bacon brownie entry and in subsequent years he has qualified with a combination of persistence and innovative bacon dishes.

Today, cooking with bacon is Hogan’s passion. A wide variety of qualifying events are held across the country throughout the year, including about 30 event opportunities for aspiring participants in the bacon category of the World Food Championships.

“Bacon has really just kind of taken over the world,” Hogan said during a presentation at this year’s American Association of Meat Processors Conference and Exhibition.

He said the culinary possibilities with bacon are seemingly limitless and those boundaries are extended by the creativity many chefs have demonstrated by serving dishes using pork belly.

“People are using pork belly and doing things that we never thought could be done,” he said.

“You can take bacon and add any kind of seasoning or flavor to elevate it. You can take some jalapenos and put it on there; add some pepper or anything else; there’s just no end to it. It’s a blank canvas. If you don’t like bacon, you’re wrong.”

And in a worldwide cooking competition’s bacon category, Hogan and the other 19 teams competing this year know that rolling out bacon and eggs will not be enough to impress the discerning judges. The bar is raised each year by food crafters and standing out among the top chefs in the global field requires something special.

In 2022 Hogan and his team of two sous chefs won 6th place for their bacon entries at the WFC. In 2023, the WFC was held in Dallas, which is where Hogan and his team won fourth place in the bacon category with his bacon bon-bon, besting the previous year’s sixth-place finish. But those successes were preceded by some hard knocks. He said there was a learning curve to negotiate in the WFC, just like there are in other food competitions.

“In the World Food Championships, I had to learn their way of doing things — it’s more ‘cheffy,’” he said. “I was always just a barbecue guy putting meat on parsley in a box.”

That first year competing in the WFC, it was just Hogan and his son, who had very little food experience but provided an extra set of helpful hands.

“That year we didn’t fare well,” Hogan said. “We didn’t know what we were getting into.”

In fact, Hogan’s team didn’t finish in the top 10 in the bacon category in the first four years of competing, but came the closest when finishing 15th in 2019, a year before the competition was canceled because of COVID.

Building a bench

To help him refine his skills, Hogan eventually added two trained sous chefs to work with him at the WFC. Stephanie Gulbransen joined the team for the 2021 competition after meeting Hogan at the event where she was also competing several years before. She also suggested Hogan add her colleague PJ Copithorne to the roster, a classically trained chef and WFC competitor who went on to be a part of the team for the next four competitions.

“I knew he had experience, and I knew Stephanie had experience because she finished in the top 10 the year before,” Hogan said. “If they wanted to work with me, I was all for it. These are people that I need, plus they knew how to do the presentation and the ‘cheffy’ kind of things with the plates.”

The trio had never worked together before 2021, but fortunately their personalities and skills were a great fit. Their first dishes for that year’s competition were a pork belly wonton cup followed by a bacon carrot cake. The team was able to make it to the next round, which had a theme of sliders. Team Hogan went on to stick with the pork belly theme and modified the wonton entry into a slider, using a bun in place of the wonton cup, which scored well enough to qualify the team for the 2022 WFC.

Besides serving as Hogan’s culinary mentor, PJ is also one of his biggest cheerleaders.

“He always told me ‘You got this, Mike, you got this.’”

In 2022 Hogan’s team scored in the top 10 with his bacon bon-bon and qualified for the second round and made his bacon pizza that had scored well at a WFC in 2018. That pizza literally had a secret sauce from Vince Marino, owner of Mie Radici Oils and Seasonings, who was attending the event that year and stepped in to add his homemade Sicilian sauce and supplied the aged balsamic on top.

“And that moved us up to 6th place for the final,” Hogan said. “Sixth in the world, man — bacon pizza.”

Endlessly innovating

Developing ideas for his bacon inspired entries for each year’s WFC begins the day after the current year’s WFC ends. When developing ideas for new dishes, Hogan keeps in mind that everything has to be created from scratch, on site with a time limit of 90 minutes. Each competitor is required to deliver five plates and a presentation plate with their entry to the judging area before time expires and hopefully without dropping any of the plates. In early August he said the 100-day countdown to submit his recipe for the 2024 WFC was on. He had already tried four different dishes at that time and none of them were good enough and he was back at the culinary drawing board.

“I go through a lot of different things,” he said. “I test it and then I take it to my neighbors [for feedback]. It’s a long process.”

He’s proud to have his food photographed and one of his recipes included in the newest “World Food Championships’ Burgers and Bacon” cookbook, which highlights previous years’ top-tier entries, including Hogan’s bacon pizza from 2022.

His pizza crust recipe used only self-rising flour mixed with Greek yogurt, ensuring it would rise in about 10 minutes given the competition’s 90-minute deadline. After rolling out the dough and brushing it with (what else) bacon fat, the crust was charred on a grill and brushed with more bacon fat and homemade Sicilian sauce was added. Par-cooked bacon was added (from edge to edge) and topped with mozzarella and Romano cheese that was melted in the oven before adding a crumble of sun-dried tomatoes, bacon, basil and a drizzle of aged balsamic.

Another one of his successful entries in previous competitions was a cro-nut, which Hogan described as a mix between a croissant and a donut.

“We stuffed that full of bacon goodness,” Hogan said, “with some pecans and some bacon jam and then some more bacon. We stuffed it all in there and then we put it in the oven and baked it,” finishing it with a glaze and topped with candied bacon.

Another WFC entry that has been clutch is Hogan’s pork belly wonton, made using confit bacon.

“I get a bunch of fat (in a pan),” he said of the process, “and I put chunks, like big strips of bacon in there and I confit it, cook it nice and fat and it comes out so mouthwatering; it melts in your mouth.”

The chef’s process for making his now-famous bacon bon-bons includes making candied bacon and putting the strips in small brownie cups. He adds bourbon-infused chocolate ganache into the cups and adds some confit bacon and tops it with more ganache. The final topper is a crumbled mixture of bacon, Dot’s pretzels and pecans toasted in bacon fat.

Bill-E’s club

Knowing the importance of working with the highest quality raw products, Hogan’s longtime exclusive bacon supplier for any competition event is Bill-E’s Small Batch Bacon, owned and operated by Bill Stitt. A processor and foodservice company based in Fairhope, Ala., Bill-E’s has been a supporter and sponsor of Hogan’s competitive team since 2018.

Hogan said the quality of Bill-E’s product is a step or two above commodity bacon. It starts with the heritage hogs used to make the products and the slow and deliberate steps he follows to make the bellies into strips of heavenly bacon.

“When I cook it and it comes out, the fat is almost clear, like water,” Hogan said. “That’s why I like using it, because it’s a really pure form. People have told me that if you’re using Bill-E’s in competition, you’re almost cheating.”

Hard knocks

Hogan has learned plenty of lessons in his culinary journey and in life. At the age of 58, he would be the first to admit that he was a late bloomer compared to the path of many chefs in the industry, and working with food has always been a side hustle.

“I’ve been doing the competition cooking since 2013, and now people are starting to recognize me.” To pay the bills he’s held a day job for years as a salesman of first aid and safety supplies and later as a warehouse worker. At the ripe age of 55, Hogan enrolled in the Institute for the Culinary Arts at Omaha’s Metropolitan Community College to learn more about the culinary arts in case he needed a career to fall back on. With no intentions of opening a restaurant like many of the students in the program, Hogan never formally graduated from the school but said he learned what he needed to take the next steps in his journey. In 2022 he started a food business using his barbecue team’s original name, which offered catering for banquets and special events, private cooking lessons and cooking for small dinner parties. Earlier this year, Hogan changed the company’s name from Spice Your Life Rub Your Meats to Chef Michael Hogan, to reflect how his expertise has expanded well beyond the barbecue pit. Part of that expansion includes offering group-based team-building experiences and corporate cooking demonstrations.

Health hurdles

Hogan’s participation in the 2023 WFC was somewhat of a miracle. Three weeks before the November event, Hogan suffered a series of health problems that landed him in the Intensive Care Unit after he suffered from extensive internal bleeding that was nearly fatal.

After being treated at the hospital and released, Hogan experienced excruciating pain in his arm that was diagnosed as Parsonage-Turner Syndrome, a neurological disorder that is characterized by severe arm and shoulder pain that can result in limited mobility for months. With only partial use of his left arm and hand, Hogan was determined to make the trip to Dallas in November and compete in the WFC. He told the doctor, “‘You don’t understand, I have to go to the World Food Championships,’” he recalled. And against doctors’ orders, he drove himself to Texas to compete.

Fortunately for Hogan, his two-person crew stepped up to compensate for the fact that he couldn’t lift his arm above his chest at that time, and his hand was practically paralyzed.

“We went down there, we did the cro-nut for our first dish, and we finished in the top seven, which meant we got to cook again in the next round,” he said.

Getting to the next round was great, except: “I really didn’t have a second dish,” he recalled.

After collaborating with his team, they decided to enter the go-to bacon bon-bon, hoping the master judges loved the impromptu dish. In this round, each chef also is required to sit in front of the judges while they taste their entry and discuss the dish with them, adding another layer of nervousness. Thankfully the feedback was positive, and the judges lauded the team for being able to create the bon-bon within the 90-minute deadline.

“They just had those good words to say and then we end up fourth in the world in bacon,” he said. “There were people there competing from Japan, from Australia…and we were fourth in the world; and I couldn’t even move my arm.”

The lesson he has shared since that experience is one of perseverance.

“Don’t give up. Follow your dreams,” he said. “Just because you have something wrong with you, just because you have a handicap, doesn’t mean you can’t do it.”

In 2024 Hogan is hoping to go from fourth place to first place in his category, which comes with a $10,000 prize plus an invitation to come back to the finals to face off against all the other categories’ winners, competing for a grand prize of $150,000.

“But last year, being in fourth place, I felt like I was in first place,” said Hogan, who has a new lease on life after nearly dying just one year ago.

AAMP conference attendees who heard Hogan’s story and wondered why he’d go to the 2023 WFC after almost dying, his answer was simple.

“Because I love bacon; I want to cook bacon, and that’s what I do — I manipulate bacon.”