The inane I can deal with because after routinely running the I-76/I-95 carbecue corridor to/from PHL for the better part of 18 months, it becomes an exercise in whether any of the new examples of poor driving are at all surprising. However, the trek to and from the southern apple fields wound up resembling an extended full-throttle Road Warrior-esque experience as everyone switched from transporting children to school to rushing to the malls to complete last-minute shopping. You know you’re in trouble when all routes out from the fields are packed with throngs of adrenalin-laden Montana drivers powering down the asphalt trying to simultaneously beat one another to the access points into shopping galleria parking lots.

Navigating through extended stretches of desperate shoppers does not make for a calm commute and after drives like this, I arrive generally with no time and in no particular mood to make something good like an eight-treasure duck or rafute/buta no kakuni (豚のかくに). Since eating out or getting take-aways get pretty expensive pretty fast, it still comes down to coming up with something reasonable in a limited amount of time. I could have this can of Klik that I’ll have to get around to opening since that’s a “once a year” ritual, but that requires bread and condiments which of course requires a certain amount of planning.

Or I could rummage through the refrigerator and pantry and come up with something else.

This is a fairly free-form recipe and I don’t claim originality since I’m sure I’ve eaten this somewhere.

Ingredients

• 227 g mushrooms
• 1 grey shallot
• 1 clove garlic
• 4 rashers of bacon cut into lardons
• arugula
• unsalted butter
• cream of white balsamic (also known as white balsamic glaze)
• pasta (whatever you like)
• parmigiano-reggiano cheese

Preparation

Finely slice or shred the mushrooms and mince the shallot and garlic. Cook the bacon lardons until the bacon is crispy. Remove the bacon and let drain on a paper towel and retain two tablespoons of bacon fat in the pan. Start cooking the pasta, timing it so that it is ready (al dente) once the sauce is ready.

Soften the shallot and garlic in the pan with the bacon fat, then add mushrooms. Cook mushrooms, and add salt and pepper to taste. Add arugula, toss the contents of the pan so arugula starts to wilt, and add a couple of squirts of cream of white balsamic. Add a small quantity of butter.

Add the cooked pasta to the arugula and mushrooms. Toss the pasta and sauce together. Return the cooked bacon back to the pan and toss contents again.

Service

Plate the pasta (bowl or plate), grate the parmigiano over top, and eat (preferably using utensils).

Photos

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Notes

I made the demo with button mushrooms but I suspect that using pleurottes (oyster) rather than button mushrooms would be a nicer alternative. Then again, if you were Ronny, the mushrooms would just get ixnay’ed.

I guess if you really wanted to, you could also omit the bacon, butter and cheese and use a vegetable oil to transform this dish into a true vegan alternative, but to paraphrase Todd Flanders, that would make Baby J*sus cry.

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

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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.