# Origin Story Part 1 | TBJ Gourmet

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/156684
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:156684
- Published at: 2022-07-11 20:53:49 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-10 01:54:10 UTC

## Author
Michael Oraschewsky

## Subject
TBJ Gourmet

## Content
One question we get a lot is how did this all come to pass, so while we wait for some big news next week, let me tell you a tale.When we started making bacon jam at the restaurant it was a lot of fun but very difficult. We quickly scaled into the largest pots available for stove top, cooking multiple 25lb batches of bacon jam a night. We started with 10-15lbs of diced bacon cooking until it was just getting crispy. Then we adding the onions and cooked until translucent. We would combine now reduced ingredients into new pots and deglaze the first ones with apple cider vinegar to get all the crisp bits stuck to the bottom. Finally adding the brown sugar to create a molten mass of bubbling bacon jam. Once the readings were correct we would start the hand jarring process, pouring 200F bacon jam into jars and quickly capping them to be cooled and labeled. Towards the end of this era which lasted about 6 months we were cooking the whole night through just to keep up with demand at the Philadelphia Christmas Village, our first big play. We would cook til dawn and drive the bacon jam down to the booth only to see it sold out by evening. I rolled my little piggy up the hill night after night and it was awesome.