Bacon Explosion Recipe

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Garden Fork. This is Henry, this is Moose and this is Mitchy. Today, we’re going to do the bacon explosion which is in the New York Times, take bacon, add sausage and blog. Well, blog is a way to spread your message, and every member of the Green House gets their own blog in the site by the way, when you sign up. But, I like bacon and Italian sausage and this was invented by these barbecuers in Texas. So we’re going to try this. Those are the two guys. That’s Jason and Aaron. Always wash your hands. We have to preheat the oven. I think we’ve preheat it to 225 degrees. You can use your oven or you can use your smoker. It’s just way too cold outside. I’m frustrated for our smoker to work properly, or a cardboard box smoker to work properly. So to make this, you need 10 or 12 strips of thick bacon. You also need Italian sausage. We got the sweet kind item. The hot kind is a little too hot for me. I don’t know if it’s just my palate. At our butcher, you can buy in bulk. They’re not in the casing but they were out of that today, so I got a pound and a half of links and we’ll just cut this open. And then you need some dry rub. A lot of people have there own costumed dry rub recipes and I’m going to see if I get some of the guys to post their dry rub recipes on the greenhouse. This is one we got from the IGA, our locally-owned grocery store. And then some barbecue sauce. Again, people make their own. We bought Stubb’s because I like the label. Smokey Mesquite so we’ll see what happens here. And you take five strips of bacon and lay them next to each other, side by side. This is what they call a thick cut bacon and bacon has a lot of fat on it anyway, and if you can buy locally raised bacon, or grass-fed pork. Anyway, I mean, the more local your bacon, the better quality it is. We went to the store the other day and I wanted to get some ground pork for a show, and the guy literally said, “Oh, none of the ground pork has come from the factory” and it really stuck in my head. I’m like it comes from a pork factory. So that really kind of got me to think about get more local food so just there, preaching there for a minute. We have five laid like this, and then we have to braid five into these. This goes here like that, and then folds this back and this goes on here. So you fold back every other one. While we’re braiding these, you need to cook two slices of bacon. This is going to end up being six slices on one side. Well, bacon explosion was a recipe invented by these two guys who did competition barbecue. They kind of brainstormed and came up with this, and then they posted it on their website, and they used Twitter, which I’m on by the way, and the Green House and the Garden Fork. Everyone’s on Twitter. If you go to our site, you can see all the icons to follow us on Twitter. So, they just used the internet, what they call social media to spread the word about bacon explosion to the point that, finally, the New York Times got its attention to it. And boom, here we are. Well, I realized I made a mistake. You were supposed to start out with two pounds of thick-cut bacon. And then after you’re done weaving, you take the remainder of the two pounds and you fry it up. So we have two of these and that’s good. We should probably have a little bit more bacon for crisping. But we’ll just go with the flow here. You start with two pounds, do your weave and whatever is left over, you fry up to do the crisping part. Alright, so we take a tablespoon of the dry rub and we sprinkle on our weave. Alright now, we take our sausage and we put this on here and we press this out, kind of like you’re pressing out a dough. I think I would really keep it out loose. If you bought the sausage loose, it would be a little bit better than this. But what we do now is we take a half of cup of your barbecue sauce and we put that on here. Yeah, it smells good. Ok now, we add another tablespoon of the dry rub. So now we have to roll the Italian sausage, forward and back, and then roll the whole thing and I don’t know if I can do this so— This is kind of scary but it’s working. So we’ve rolled this to the end. Yes, I forgot something else. You’re supposed to take the bacon that you cooked, and break it up and sprinkle it on to the sausage before you roll it up. I’m just going to lay it in here like this. Now, we’re going to take the sausage and the bacon and roll it back. You’ve pressed this out so there’s not any air in there. And we’re going to take a little help from the tin foil, and roll it back. Wow, that’s great, look at that. That’s beautiful. We’re going to transfer this to a baking sheet. Another table spoon of your barbecue rub. Alright, this goes in at 225-degree oven or your smoker, and we’ll let it cook for about an hour per inch so and you have to let it get up to a hundred and sixty five degrees, so what we’re going to do is to put in our little temperature there. And now we’d wait for bacon splendor. I mean, not a literal explosion, it’s bacon overload and it’s a great name for a recipe. I used a little thermometer thing here. It got up to about 175 internal so I turned it down a little bit and can get rid of that dog. Aright, so let’s take a look. Wow, that smells like bacon. Well, it’s definitely cooked. I like the idea of putting it in with a piece of foil like this as you see. That’s my adaptation. So, Jason and Aaron say when it comes out, you put more barbecue sauce in there, a glaze, I was reading, they have a blog by the way, watch out our post right here because I’m blogging. They also have a Facebook page, you could be a fan of bacon explosion and I became a fan today. So we’re going to take this and we’re going to glaze this. Alright, I mean ideally, you could use your brush, I’m just using my fingers, but that’s allowed in Garden Fork. It suggest cutting in into half inch strips so it’s like it’s that rich. So I know that we screwed up the cooked bacon in there. You should put a lot more of cooked bacon in there than we did. But here is what it looks like. Now if we had done the bacon correctly, there’d be still strips of cooked bacon in there as well. You could also put this on like a hamburger roll. But this is kind of coming apart a little bit. Wow, that’s the taste of explosion. You need a beer with this. The Italian sausage is a lot stronger that I thought it would. But I think probably when you smoke it, probably the smoky flavor will help balance out the Italian sausage part. It’s just it has an Italian, it’s the thyme, it’s the fell really that, what comes through is the fell, that really comes through. It’s all over. I don’t think you can eat more than a couple bites of this thing. It’s pretty rich. That was really worth it, bacon explosion. I mean we’ll post the recipe on our site. A little added variation to it. I still have the flavors in my mouth now. I don’t think anyone thought of that far advance type. Alright so come to Green House. Make it a great day.