Conan O'Brien Immortalized in Bacon, White Chocolate

by Sara Bonisteel, Posted Aug 27th 2009 @ 12:30PM

"Tonight Show" host Conan O'Brien can rest easy knowing he's really made it in show business now that he's been recreated in bacon and white chocolate.

"I've long dreamed of this, but I never thought I'd see it happen," O'Brien said Wednesday as he unveiled the 200-pound bust on his program. While he said it was a gift from the Minnesota State Fair, Slashfood has learned that isn't exactly the truth behind the tasty tribute.

The bust was actually commissioned by a meat company, No Name Premium Meats, in St. Michael, Minn., a fair official told us Thursday.

The company commissioned the sculpture after O'Brien said in June that he would visit the Minnesota State Fair if they sent him his weight in chocolate-covered bacon, "which is one of the delicacies of the state fair," Kris Patrow, a publicist for No Name told Slashfood.

It took sculptor Linda Christensen a week to carve the likeness into a 300-pound block of white chocolate, Patrow says. Christensen carves the Princess Kay of the Milky Way butter sculptures for the state fair.

Linda Christensen carving chocolate Conan O'Brien sculpture. Photo: No Name Premium Meats

Josh Henderson, director of marketing for No Name, refused to tell Slashfood how much it cost to produce the Conan O'Bacon tribute. "It was definitely worth everything to deliver such an accurate likeness of Conan," he says.

"Bacon Cocoa Conan" has its own Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube representation.

Alas, the sculpture -- which "Tonight Show" sidekick Andy Richter joked was "better than Michelangelo's 'David'" -- fell apart as it was being moved out of the studio.

"We knew the risk was there that it might not last forever, but we got great pictures of it, and the memory of Conan posing next to it with his wavy red hair and the wavy red No Name bacon on top of that white chocolate was worth every bit of work that went into it," Henderson says.

[Via Eat Me Daily]

Filed Under: Food News, Edible Gifts, Celebrities
Tags: andy richter, AndyRichter, conan obrien, ConanObrien, edible gifts, minnesota state fair, MinnesotaStateFair, no name steaks, NoNameSteaks, the tonight show, TheTonightShow