Building the Bacon Explosion
I think by now everyone has heard of the Bacon Explosion. It’s the football size smoked homage to pork created by the BBQ Addicts that burnt up the food portions of the blogosphere when it was first posted last December. Simple enough – bacon, sausage, barbecue – I’m always ready for something with pork and I like bacon but this just seemed somewhat “meh” and not ”oy vey!”. I’m not sure why it captured the collective conscious but okay, whatever… le’ts give it a whirl and see what the results are.
A Bacon Explosion is not exactly the most convoluted of recipes with a whopping four ingredients (bacon, Italian sausage, spice rub, barbecue sauce) and it’s intended to be smoked over charcoal. As I don’t have access to a smoker, I elected to dump the barbecue sauce as I wasn’t sure whether it would glaze or stay gloopy when used in an oven. Besides, I wanted to see if this really was porky goodness. So, I went and got a package of President’s Choice Old Fashioned Style Bacon, a kilo of spicy Italian sausage, and broke out the dry herbs and spices to make up a spice rub.
Assembly Instructions
[BBQAddicts] To kick off the construction of this pork medley you’ll need to create a 5×5 bacon weave. Okay – one bacon weave. My weave’s a bit tighter than the demo, but the idea is to work fast as the bacon gets very soft and pliable very quickly. The PC Old-Fashioned Bacon isn’t the same length so a square weave with this stuff turns out to be 7×6, leaving five slices for the bacon core.
[BBQAddicts] The next step is to add some barbecue seasoning on top of your bacon weave. Take two pounds of Italian sausage and layer it directly on top of your bacon weave. A kilo of Italian sausage produced a relatively thin layer of sausage, so either I had too little sausage or the original 5×5 weave produced a square that was smaller than my 7×6 weave.
[BBQAddicts] Take the remaining bacon slices and fry them up. Crumble or chop the cooked strips into bite size pieces and place on top of the sausage layer. Take your favorite sauce and drizzle it all over the top of the bacon pieces. Once you’ve sauced the bacon, sprinkle on some more of the barbeque seasoning you used on the bacon weave. Check on frying up the bacon, chopping into smaller pieces and sprinkling them onto the sausage. I skipped the sauce since I didn’t want to have a runny centre.
[BBQAddicts] Very carefully separate the front edge of the sausage layer from the bacon weave and begin rolling backwards. You want to include all layers EXCEPT the bacon weave in your roll. Check. This is actually a spiral roll and not the manner in which norimaki is made.
[BBQAddicts] Roll the sausage forward completely wrapping it in the bacon weave. The weave started to separate at this point, partially because of the manipulation, and partially because the bacon was very pliable from the increase in temperature during prep.
[BBQAddicts] Cook your Bacon Explosion at 225 degrees in a constant cloud of hickory smoke until your Thermapen gives an internal temperature reading of 165 degrees. BBQAddicts indicates that this takes approximately 1 hour per inch diameter so around 2.5 hours for their typical Explosion. I threw it into a 135ºC / 250ºF oven and pulled when the internal temperature read 165ºF on the roasting thermometer.
Deviations. This is where I started to deviate from the BBQAddicts narrative. First of all, this generated an incredible amount of fat, which wound up dripping onto the oven element and causing a small fire and a whole lot of smoke. That at least made sure I was awake. Pulling at 165ºF gave me a result that was unappetizing to say the least. The bacon and sausage had indeed cooked through, but the bacon was still pink/grey and really flabby. No crispness, no color. Onto a pan to crisp up the bacon. That generated additional fat as the weave continued to render, but with the help of the trusty blowtorch I eventually got it nicely browned.
Photos
Impressions
Once the post-processing was finished, the oven attempt looked okay. It smelled like bacon, and the bacon weave tasted like bacon. The slices looked nice. The sausage filling? Somewhat nondescript; perhaps it was the type of sausage I had purchased, or the spice rub I created or perhaps it was just bland. Probably not the rub; I could taste the parts of the sausage that had been in contact with it. I also tried it with a bit of barbecue sauce I had warmed up and glazed onto a slice of the Explosion. It added another flavor but was another flavor that was on top of a bland sausage flavor. By the way, I gave a slice of this to Butter Boy. He didn’t pass out but did mention it was salty and tasted of bacon.
I might make this again, but I’d really have to think of a way to improve the sausage filling because the spicy Italian sausage wasn’t the way to go. Maybe smoking will also add another dimension as well. We’ll see, but this isn’t really on the top of my “must repeat” list.
Additional Resources
Apart from the original blogpost, there is at least one YouTube video available on how to assemble a Bacon Explosion. Unfortunately, the people in the video are not quite as meticulous in either culinary technique or assembly (or hygiene).
Alternatively, there is a more hygienic version from the BBQ Pit Boys.
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