Smokin some Fatties, again, not those kind of fatties, and some grilled beans

This is not the first post I have done about smoking fatties on the grill. You can see the write-up of previously smoked fatties here. And I will say again that they are not that kind of fatty. A fatty is simply smoked bulk sausage. Often it is breakfast sausage. Sometimes they are stuffed and sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they are sweet and sometimes spicy. The number of different ways to cook fatties is limitless.

I smoked two fatties in this cookout. One is the recipe that I get the most raves about; sage sausage stuffed with cheese, and a new recipe that I created on the fly; regular sausage stuffed with yellow pepper, white corn and cheddar. I also grilled some beans.

In the spirit of trying to be more quantitative I actually did some measuring and wrote down amounts for the recipe. Click below to find those measurements...

Here are the basic ingredients I used for the two fatties:

In the picture above are two different kinds of sausage. The sage sausage was used with the garlic, asiago, havarti and garlic. The regular sausage was used with the garlic, asiago, yellow pepper and sweet white corn. What I omitted from this picture was granulated garlic that I used as a rub on both fatties.

Let's start with the sage fatty first. The ingredients are as follows:

1 LB of sage breakfast sausage (other types of sausage can be used)
1/3 LB of havarti cheese (I have uses white cheddar in the past)
2 heaping tbsp of minced garlic
1/2 cup of loosely packed asiago cheese
10 turns of a pepper grinder
Enough granulated garlic to dust the outside

Combine the sausage, garlic, asiago and black pepper in a mixing bowl. Sausage and garlic:

Now the asiago and black pepper:

Using your hands mix the ingredients together well. Really get in there and squish it all up. Then spread the meat on a piece of wax paper and spread out evenly:

Chunk up the havarti and place in the middle of the sausage leaving plenty of room around the edge to seal the cheese in. Here I chunked up an entire half pound of havarti. I know I said only a 1/3 pound above. I had too much:

When I tried to roll it over to seal the cheese inside the sausage I realized I had either too much cheese or not enough sausage:

So I pulled some of the cheese out:

That's more like it:

I simply rolled the sausage up and patted it really well to get rid of any cracks or crevices. Then I dusted the outside with granulated garlic:

I placed the fatty in a gallon plastic bag and put it in the freezer to firm up a bit and on to my second fatty; yellow pepper, sweet white corn and cheddar stuffed fatty:

1 LB of regular breakfast sausage (again, use what you like, it's your fatty!!)
1/2 yellow pepper chunked
1 small ear of white corn with the kernels sliced off (you can used canned or yellow corn, but fresher is better)
1/4 pound cheddar cheese
2 heaping tbsp of minced garlic
1/2 cup of loosely packed asiago cheese
10 turns of a pepper grinder
Enough granulated garlic to dust the outside

Here we have the yellow pepper chunked into half inch chunks and the kernels from a small ear of white corn.

These ingredients are not going to cook enough while insulated inside the sausage so I precooked them a bit. First the yellow pepper in a skillet in a little olive oil over medium heat for 5 minutes:

Then add the corn for another three minutes:

While the corn and pepper are sautéing, mix the sausage, garlic, asiago and black pepper up in a bowl very well and place on a piece of wax paper as before. Then place the cheddar along the middle of the meat:

Spoon the peppers and corn over the cheese:

Roll up the sausage and pat it well anywhere there seems to be a crack or a crevice and dust with granulated garlic.

I put this fatty in gallon plastic bag and into the freezer as well to firm up. I left both in the freezer between 20 and 30 minutes. Then I got to work on my beans. Here is a shot of the ingredients:

2 - 1 LB cans of just original baked beans (you can use other varieties but you will be adding tons of flavor on your own that you don't need any other varieties but it is up to you)
2 heaping tbsp minced garlic
4 heaping tbsp of brown sugar
1/2 cup of maple syrup
1/4 cup of honey mustard
1/4 cup of honey
2 tsp of hoisin sauce (optional and not in the picture)
10 turns of a pepper grinder
2 sliced of maple bacon (other bacon can be used and you will need enough to cover the top with one inch square pieces so this number may vary)

Dump all ingredients except the bacon into an oven safe pot and mix together well as this will be the last time you stir them until they are ready to be served:

Slice the bacon up into one inch squares and cover the top leaving gaps between each piece. If you don't leave a gap the pieces will insulate each other and take much longer to cook:

Now out to my smoker. I made a few modifications to my offset in order to keep the temp up and more constant and this was my first chance to try them out. You can see the modifications here.

For this session I will be using apricot wood. Very similar to apple:

There are a bunch of different woods you can use for this. For a pretty extensive write up about different smoke woods click here.

After spending some time modding my grill to keep the temp up a windy day wiped that effort away in seconds. After 30 minutes I was getting a boatload of smoke but the temp was struggling to get to 150:

I needed 300 for these for 2 hours. If I left it at 150 it would take closer to 8 hours so it was time to improvise. I took the grill grate off that was on the opposite side of my firebox in the main chamber and added a pile of hot coals:

Within minutes the temp started to climb:

After an hour of heavy smoke at 150f (took me another 30 minutes to get a half chimney of coals hot) I was cooking at close to 300 at which point my cheese started to ooze out of my sage fatty which is why both are sitting on foil to save that cheese:

My pepper and corn stuffed fatty is doing just fine:

While carrying my chilled cheese stuffed fatty outside I bumped it and split it open a bit. Trying to pat it back together when that cold didn't work all that well so I had the foil under it from the beginning.

Here are both fatties with some smoke rising up:

About 90 minutes into the process the bacon on the beans is browning up as are the fatties:

Now I am building up quite a bit of grease in the foil:

This is easy solved with the probe from my remote thermometer. I just poked a hole in the foil of each fatty to let the fat drain out:

Here we have 2 hours in:

At 2.5 hours everything is ready to come off the grill. Remember, they only need 2 hours at 275-300 but I got off to a slow start:

Here are the fatties resting. Despite the cheese oozing out of the one already, I let them rest for about 10 minutes. If I were to slice into them earlier the hot cheese would run right out:

Here are the beans. That bacon has rendered its fat into the beans during the cooking process to add that extra flavor punch that only bacon fat seems to provide:

Here are my fatties ready to be sliced. The cheese has cooled enough on the outside that it actually stuck to the meat rather than the foil:

Here we have the sage cheese stuffed fatty:

Here is a close up so you can see the nice smoke ring:

And here is the yellow pepper/white corn/cheddar stuffed fatty:


These are so much fun to do and so simple. You really should try one. Follow one of my recipes or try your own. The possibilities are endless!!

As for what I would do differently, well, I may be at my wits end with the offset smoker. I may be in the market for a vertical smoker in the near future so check back to see what I can create in one of those…



Click here for the rest of the process

Who needs Baked Beans when you can have Grilled Beans!!

Baked beans have been a standard staple in terms of a side dish for BBQ seemingly forever. But why settle for baked beans? The grill is already up and running, why not use it to take baked beans to the next level. Why not impart some of that amazing smoky flavor that we so desire permeating the meat into the beans? There are a million ways to do grilled beans. This is just one of them. This is the simplest side dish. The prep time was all of 10 minutes and made a great side dish for a group of 20.


Let's start off with the ingredients. Here we have three large cans of Bush's Original Baked Beans. You can use anything here. There will be so many more flavors added that I don't bother buying something other than the original as the added flavors will overpower any specialized beans. Along with the beans there is garlic, olive oil, brown sugar, maple bacon and apple pie stuffing. That's right. Apple pie stuffing. Bear with me:

If I'm doing these for say 4 or 6 I would pick a pot with a metal handle and do all the prep in the pot and transfer it straight to the grill. But with 20 people coming over I needed something bigger to go on the grill. What I did in this pot on the stove was transferred to a double stack of a good size disposable tin tray. First things first. Throw in a little olive oil and garlic into a pot and get that garlic sweating over medium heat:

Add about a half cup of brown sugar and more olive oil as the sugar just soaked it up:

While the garlic is sauteing, as well as the sugar, chop up the apple pie stuffing into smaller chunks.

Then add the chunks to the pot to cook them down a bit:

While this is simmering I dumped the contents of the cans of beans into the disposable trays. I doubled them up to give the beans more support. After the garlic, brown sugar, apple concoction had simmered for a few minutes, I dumped them into the pan with the beans along with a healthy dose of fresh cracked black pepper and mixed it all through:

At this point I pulled out a few slices of maple bacon and sliced into one inch squares. You won't need the whole pound. This is a healthy version of the other things I normally prepare with bacon!!

I placed the bacon squares along the top of the beans but left a little space between each one so they wouldn't insulate each other and thus cook more quickly:

Depending on how much time you have you can place these directly over the heat or off to the side to slow cook. When I do ribs for say 6 hours I put them off to the side for 5 hours or so. We didn't have that kind of time so 2.5 hours on direct heat will have to do. Here are the beans next to the ribs with the Bologna Chub in the background:

Here are the beans simmering on the grill about 90 minutes later. The bacon is cooking nicely and the whole dish could be eaten at this point. But the longer they stay on the more flavors infuse into the beans:

And here are the beans ready to serve. The reason I don't use whole strips of bacon is because when they are ready to serve I just stir the bacon into the beans.


Now I will admit that I had never tried the apple pie stuffing in beans before. Normally I make this recipe exactly the same but without the stuffing. Sometimes I mince up some sweet onion, but this is usually my recipe. I had seen the apple pie stuffing on a couple of sites and decided to try it.

After the food was served and everyone was well on in tearing into their respective plates I asked the crowd for feedback. After a bit of goading I finally got a little more than, "everything is great." I had to assure them that they would not insult their hosts by giving constructive feedback. I was worried that it would be too sweet but I didn't get much of that. Even had a suggestion to add molasses next time. A couple people felt that it needed more salt. I figured the salt in the bacon would have taken care of that but maybe I need to add a pinch of salt next time. A couple people thought they were a bit thin. With a shorter cooking time the beans did not cook down as much as my usual beans do. I could've poured off a little of the sauce prior to cooking next time if I don't have as much time like I did here. So plan accordingly on that front.


What I would do differently next time:

1. Add a little salt. With a pan this big a pinch or two would do the trick
   
2. If I only have a couple hours of cooking time I would open the cans halfway with the can opener and pour a little of the sauce off the top using the top of the half opened can as a sieve so I don't lose any beans. If I have more than a couple hours then I skip this step and just let it cook down normally
   

Click here for the rest of the process