Several months ago, a friend stumbled across this little delight on the internet. It is called "Bacon Explosion" and had earned its creators some well-deserved meaty fame. Long story short, it is bacon wrapped in sausage, wrapped in bacon and smoked to meaty perfection. Even though I don't have a smoker, I decided to try to make one for the annual Luau thrown by my dear friends here in Denton.
The day of Luau, I took an early trip to my local megamart on Baby the Scooter (YAYHAPPYFUNSCOOTERTIME) and loaded up on sausage, bacon, and my favorite barbecue sauce. Once all the materials were assembled, I got started.
I started by putting a large sheet of foil down to protect the countertop from grease and the grease from anything that might have lurked on the countertop. The first step was time consuming but not difficult: the bacon basketweave. The size of the end product is limited by the length of the strips of bacon at this point, so I had chosen a nice, long package of bacon, cut thick as the recipe recommends. I plan to try a thinner cut next time I do this because the outer layer did not cook to my satisfaction.
The next step is pretty simple: sprinkle the basketweave of bacon with your favorite rub. The original recipe suggests the creators's own rub (of course) but I went with Adam's Brisket Rub. It is the key to my pork ribs and an all-around nice rub. It's not overly spicy; not overly salty; a nice savory assortment of flavor; and available at nearly every store I shop.
On to the sausage layer: I used Jimmy Dean All Natural (no preservative) sausage. It is my favorite pork sausage for any recipe that isn't Italian. It took some work to get a nice even layer without destroying the basketweave underneath but I managed. I gently pressed the sausage into an even layer that was just smaller than the frame of the bacon. I used the full two pounds of sausage but I think next time I will go with slightly less because the final product was not as "bacon-y" as I'd hoped.
Then I added a generous schmear of barbecue sauce, the cooked bacon crumbles, and a little cheese before rolling up the sausage. I chopped the bacon pretty fine for the inside and I think I should have cut the pieces before cooking them so they would be a little bigger. The rolling would have been harder but the bacon would have been more obvious in the final product. The rolling was the hardest step. The sausage was very soft and bulky and the bacon and cheese tried to escape. It was a true test of my manual abilities. (^_-)
Then I wrapped the sausage roll in the bacon basketweave and placed it seam-side-down on the baking rack of my biggest jellyroll pan. I wanted plenty of room for the grease to collect. AS I said before, I don't have a smoker so I used my oven to make this bacon-y bad boy. I inserted my meat thermometer, set the timer for 165 degrees, and baked this baby at 225'F. It took about two hours and 45 minutes to reach temperature, which is pretty darn close to the recipe's 1-hour-per-inch-of-thickness time estimate.
It rendered out pretty well and the seam held perfectly but the outer layer of bacon was not as cooked as I felt it should have been. So I ramped up the temperature on the oven to 400 and crisped up the outer layer. Then I turned off the oven, basted with more barbecue sauce and left it in the cooling oven for a little while so the sauce could get sticky.
Sadly, I don't have a photo of the beautifully brown Bacon Explosion in all its glazed glory but once it was sliced and put on slider buns, it went fast. Everyone who wanted to try it got to. I learned a lot about what to do better next time. A huge thank you to the creators of the original Bacon Explosion for giving me something fun to offer to the meat-eaters in my life!
