Good Monday to you all.
Our weather has once again changed! It’s 61° and sunny no ice or snow in sight. It seems that the gods are happy with us this week so we have good weather in store for the next few days here.
At the end of my last post I hinted that this weeks fare would include BACON….everyone loves bacon right? A little background here. I have spoken of a group of friends that like to use their smokers, I have used these people for advice and inspiration as to what to learn to cook. A few weeks back one of these gentleman was talking about providing a lunch for a group of us that are helping on a project. He listed a few things for us to choose from and one of them was something called a “Bacon Explosion”. The name caught me and I had to go look up what the heck this magical thing was, after it had BACON in it.
I did some web surfing and found that this was a creation of a group of guys that were professional BBQ competitors. This is their web site BBQ Addicts. The light hearted fun these guys have around the thing they love is entertaining. I was glad to see they share this recipe openly as well as offer to sell you one fully prepared. I, for one, enjoy the making almost as much as the eating so I had to make on myself. The recipe is pretty much straight forward and easy to put together. I kind of agree that you may need to schedule an appointment with your cardiac Dr. before you eat it…it is not what one would call a healthy meal.
I did alter it slightly because I was working with items I already had on hand. When I smoked this we were in the beginnings of the second ice storm to hit the Hinterlands in 3 weeks, I did not want to drive to the local food distributor and possibly have to walk home due to bad planning on my part. I also made ½ the recipe since Michelle was very skeptical, and I knew I would have to eat the leftovers 🙂 – which I did over the next few days. Made a great breakfast the next day! So, here is the list of ingredients I used.
1 ½ lbs of mild ground breakfast sausage
1 lb thick sliced BACON
½ lb of regular sliced bacon
1 jar of your favorite BBQ rub ( I used Walter Jettson’s BBQ rub, the recipe is below)
1 jar of your favorite thick BBQ sauce (I made mine it can be found on Daily Dish Magazine.)
You start by frying the ½ lb of regular bacon, drain , crumble and set aside. Next make a square weave of the thick sliced bacon on either wax paper or foil, this will be the outer covering for the pork sausage. Sprinkle some of the BBQ rub over the bacon giving it a good coating. Remove the pork sausage from it’s wrapper and press it on top of the bacon making sure it covers the bacon to about ½ inch from the edges, try to keep it uniform thickness. (you can use just about any ground sausage. If you choose a “hot” sausage you may want to reduce the amount of BBQ rub you use. Sprinkle the remainder of your rub (or as much as you want) on top of the sausage then add the bacon crumbles on to of that. You may snack on the EXTRA fried bacon only if it has not come in contact with the RAW pork sausage or bacon. We don’t want to have to head to the ER for food poisoning…..can ruin an night for all of you. Once you have added the crumbles you now add your BBQ sauce on top be a bit liberal with it. Now the fun part, starting on the far side of the sausage roll it (the sausage) backwards towards you, leave the bacon on the foil. Make sure you remove any air pockets so it will cook evenly. Press the seams together to seal it and then roll the sausage away from you wrapping the bacon weave around it. Press the seam together as best you can and sprinkle as much BBQ rub on the outside as you want.
Assemble your smoker and bring it up to 225°. I used hickory wood and lump charcoal plus the water pan full as a barrier from the hot coals. Your going to cook this bad boy at 225° till it reaches an internal temp of 165°. I recommend you use a quality digital thermometer on the smoker and to check internal temp of the meat. If all goes well with your fire that should be 1 hour per pound….mine took 2 hours because it was VERY cold out there…… remove it from the smoker and let it set for 5 or 10 minutes then slice into ½ thick slabs. It was GOOD….I will do it again later in the spring and adjust the recipe to warm it up spice wise.
Here is Jetton’s BBQ Rub recipe and a little background on who he was.
Enjoy the meal and let me know what you think…also stop by the BBQ Addicts web site.
Take care,
Steve
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