Michael Hogan has been slicing, dicing, mixing, and making food since he was a child. “I started cooking when I was 12,” shared the chef, who is renowned for his expertise with bacon. “My mother made me learn. She said, ‘You’re going to marry someone who doesn’t know how to cook, so you have to.’”
Learn he did, earning his first job in the kitchen at JB's Big Boy when he was just 16. Over the years, he’s cooked at various establishments plus explored other ventures, including working at hardware stores and hospital supply warehouses as well as running his own mobile DJ service.
“I got tired of cooking everyone else’s stuff,” Hogan admitted. “But I always came back to food. I want to serve people food and they take one bite and stop, take a moment, and say, ‘That’s it!’”
Today, he runs a catering company simply called “Chef Michael Hogan,” which offers everything from dinners for private parties to food for corporate events as well as cooking classes. The original name for his culinary enterprise was “Spice Your Life Rub Your Meat,” but eventually, he relented to a moniker change. “When I came onto the scene, everyone’s names were towing that line,” Hogan explained with a twinkle in his eye, “but I started doing classes for Lincoln Public Schools. It’s not really a name you want walking into a school.”
The name that Hogan has established for himself, though, largely comes from his considerable prowess with both barbecue and bacon, which came, in part, thanks to a gift of a smoker for Christmas 11 years ago—his own “Thats it!” moment of sorts. By 2016, he had entered his first competition, the Omaha Beer and Bacon Festival.
Hogan placed third. “Once you win an award in barbecue, you want to keep competing,” he shared.
He didn’t have to wait long. That placement qualified him to represent Nebraska and Omaha at the World Food Championships later that same year. Friends helped Hogan raise money to travel to Orange Beach, Alabama, for the competition, which included 10 categories that year. He worked with his nephew during the competition, and looking back, he admitted, “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into with the Food Championships. We had one dish that did well, but the second was a flop."
Hogan was better prepared during subsequent competitions and knew what to expect. In 2018, he returned to the championships and entered beer-and-bacon pizza in the structured dish category. It won second place. His bacon brownie entry in the signature dish competition, though, didn’t fare as well. “It came out like a brick, so I put this bacon Bourbon caramel sauce we made on it, and anything else to try to soften it up,” Hogan lamented. "I picked it up trying to fix it, then wanted to get a picture of it, but my nephew yelled at me, so I ran up and when I put it down [in front of the judges]; there were two seconds left on the clock.”
In 2019 Hogan was faced with a new challenge at the World Championships—creating a Bloody Mary, for bacon’s structured dish category. “I can’t stand tomato juice,” Hogan confessed. “I went around to different bars tasting all these Bloody Marys to try to develop my own.” Eventually, he came up with his own mix that included bacon Bourbon in lieu of vodka, but it didn’t quite meet the mark for the judges.
Hogan persevered. In 2021 he and his team presented judges with a bacon-carrot cake and a pork belly wonton cup, which tied for 10th place. This allowed Hogan to compete in the Super Qualifier, which automatically grants the winner a place in the subsequent year’s contest. The theme was “Sliders,” and Hogan was immediately confident. “I said to my team, ‘The pork belly wonton cup scored 94 out of 100—let’s turn that into a slider,’” Hogan shared. Unfortunately, they lost the tie-breaker. Their hard work and cleverness nevertheless paid off, qualifying Hogan for the 2022 Championships.
That year saw Hogan and his team’s creation of bacon bonbons and a bacon pizza with a delicious twist: a crumble topping made of sun-dried tomatoes, bacon, and a chiffonade of basil, all drizzled with an aged balsamic vinegar. The team finished sixth overall in the world in the bacon category, again qualifying the team for the next year’s competition.
Then, Hogan ran into more than a challenge—he lived through a nearly fatal incident. Beginning with a bad case of food poisoning that stuck with him for over a week in early October 2023, Hogan “ate two spoonfuls of rice and knew something was wrong.” Next thing he knew, Hogan passed out. “I just remember things getting black, and I woke up on the floor and saw I had internal bleeding going on,” he recalled.
A few days in the ICU led to a diagnosis of diverticulitis, an inflammation or infection of the small pouches in the digestive tract. Hogan’s loss of consciousness was due to a blood vessel bursting, which caused internal bleeding. “The doctors said if I hadn’t woken up [and called 911], I would have bled to death,” he recalled, sharing that he had lost a fourth of his blood. “I was supposed to leave for the Food Championships on November 6th,” he continued. “I’d been really sick and had to use some vacation days so I didn’t have much money coming in…When I went to the doctor on November 3rd, she said, ‘I don’t want you to go, but I know you’re going to go.’
“‘Doc, I just need to go,’ I said.” Hogan paused and then admitted with a chuckle, “So yeah, I went. I went on November 6.”
It had been less than a month since he had almost died.
Because of the fall, Hogan acquired some nerve damage in his shoulder after he lost consciousness. He therefore had very little range of motion in his arm and struggled to open his hand. “I couldn’t even lift my left arm, but I still could use my hand when needed to. I couldn’t really chop stuff or hold anything. My sous-chefs really took care of me,” he shared.
That wasn’t his only challenge. The 2023 Food Championships came with a couple rule changes: first of all, the judges would only take the top seven contestants into the finals, instead of the top 10. The competition also allowed master judges to walk around during the process. They would then move contestants up to the top seven.
Hogan’s first dish was a take on the combination of a croissant and a donut, referred to as a “cronut,” which tied him and his team for seventh place; the tiebreaker was a popularity contest—people paid to enter, tasted the food, and voted for the winner in this two-day event, dubbed the “Sam’s Club Bite Club.” Contestants were told to choose at least three ingredients from a list of five: animal crackers, bacon, pancake mix, chicharrón, and syrup. Hogan infused coffee into a Bourbon, drizzled it on the animal crackers, mixed the bacon with a caramel sauce, then frosted it with a low-sugar cream cheese frosting so it tasted more like a marscapone, a creation he dubbed “tiramizoo” a whimsical nod to the animal crackers.
Hogan's culinary inventiveness paid off: he won seventh place and went on to win the coveted fourth place for his bacon bonbons.
Day two of the contest brought some challenges but was an overall success. “We didn’t have time to go to the store and create another recipe,” Hogan said. “We had the stuff to make the bacon bonbons again, so that’s what we did.” They changed the bacon Bourbon to a regular Bourbon to infuse in the chocolate ganache and caramel. “One judge said, ‘I don’t know how you made this in about an hour and a half,’” he recalled.
The strategy worked. Hogan’s team left with a fourth place title in the bacon category.
Being ranked fourth in the world for bacon isn’t enough for Hogan. Ever competitive, the award winner is already planning for this year’s World Food Championships, which take place during early November in Indianapolis.
"Cooking is my outlet, and cooking has grounded me,” Hogan reflected. “Moving up every year once you win, you want to keep doing it. I know I’m almost there—you’re on that little lip there where you’ll be first. I’ve definitely had times when I could have just given up, and I refuse to. The competition part of it is about me finding my way.”
To learn more, visit chefmichaelhogan.com.
This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
