How the GrillinFool celebrated the Super Bowl - Part I - Bacon Explosion

Oh, what a joyous day. I love the Super Bowl. I love the culmination of the NFL season. I love the commercials. I love that it is practically a holiday that everyone gets together for. And most of all I love the food. And this year we may have gone a little overboard. If you are a health nut, this is not the place to be.

Here is the main event. This thing is all the rage right now so we decided to give it a try. What's not to love? Bacon wrapped sausage wrapped bacon? It's a cardiologist's dream. And what a perfect time to try one of these monsters - Super Bowl Sunday?


We started with two pounds of Italian Sausage, a pound of thick cut bacon (formed into a weave), a half pound of cooked bacon, a half shallot, some garlic, black pepper, some KC sweet and smoky rub (courtesy of Mr. Raichlen), BBQ sauce, some cheddar and provel cheese.


Mix up the sausage, garlic, shallots, black pepper in a bowl:

Then spread the meat out flat on a piece of wax paper. Here we have the rub applied to the sausage:

Then layer the bacon:


Add some roped provel:

Add some sharp cheddar:


Drizzle on some BBQ sauce of your preference:


You will notice that I did not apply the stuffing ingredients all the way to the edges. This is so the stuffing can be sealed within the fatty.

Since this has cheese in it it really needed to be smacked around pretty hard to make sure there are no cracks and crevices. My dad was having a hard time grasping the concept behind why we need to smack the crap out of the sausage so my mom stepped in to help out.

Once the sausage was thoroughly assaulted time to wrap it in the bacon weave that my dad prepared earlier:

There is no easy way to do this. I just picked up the far side of the bacon weave and pulled it over the top of the fatty and voila, we have a bacon wrapped sausage wrapped bacon. Looks great from this side:

From this side we need a little work:


A few toothpicks later and that bad dog was wrapped well:

Off to the grill. Going for indirect here and some good smoke action. My dad does not have a dedicated smoker but he does have a couple of grills that will suffice. For this job we went with the 20 year old Char-Broil. So how do we turn this grill into a smoker:



Coals on each side, a make shift drip pan made of tin foil and a chunk of cherry on each side. Instant smoker:


And then we have the Bacon Explosion on the grill:


About an hour in we have this:


Two hours in:


It is starting to look and smell really good right now. So much so we started attracting a crowd:


Hmmmm....Future entry on GrillinFool.com? I've got a rotisserie just waiting for one of those guys. That will have to wait for another time. Back to the grilling. Here we have the GrillinFool tending to the Fatty and some ABT's:

Three hours in:

Another 30-40 minutes later:

And here we have the Fatty on the board to rest:


Remove the toothpicks, add some foil:

15 minutes later, time to slice:


How about a closeup of that smoke ring with a different flash setting:



I gotta be honest here, this thing was good, but wasn't all that. The bacon on the outside was amazing but the rest of it was sorta, well, meh. With all the hype I just expected to be blown away. I wasn't. Not by a long shot. Here's what I would've done differently:

1. The Italian sausage was a little overpowering. Probably should've gone with some generic bulk sausage rather than the Italian.
2. It needed more cheese.

Will I try this again? Yes. With a different kind of sausage and more cheese I expect it to be better, but I still don't think it will live up to the hype. I do plan on doing the bacon weave around a pork tenderloin in the near future. This thing is a lot of work for something that just wasn't all that great.

Click here for the rest of the process

Anyone want to smoke a fatty?

For some of you that means something very different than what I will discuss in this entry. This is not a something related to sparking up a blunt. This is simply sausage smoked on a grill. There are a million ways to make fatties. Fatties can be sweet, stuffed, spicy and all things in between.

To make a fatty, one must purchase some sort of loose or bulk sausage. I've made them with one pound breakfast sausage as well as bulk sausage from the meat counter at the grocery store. Here is a cheese stuffed Fatty:

Click below if you want know more...


The first fatty I ever made was the same day I did the spiral sliced and stuffed pork loin. For that fatty I took a one pound tube of maple breakfast sausage and put it in a mixing bowl. I minced up some of the following: garlic, vidalia onion and about half a honey crisp apple and added that to the mixing bowl. A little cracked black pepper and some brown sugar completed the ingredients. I mixed all of that together and then reshaped the sausage into the form it was in when it was in the plastic tube. Then I applied a sweet rub of paprika, brown sugar, granulated garlic, chili powder and black pepper. The fatty is on the left:
No salt at all on this. There is plenty of salt in the pork.

There is nothing to cooking these things. Throw them on the grill for about 3 hours between 225-250. When it firms up it is done. You don't really have to flip them over or turn them. You can put bacon on them to baste the meat, but it is not required. Having a second level rack in my offset smoker is a great place for fatties to cook. I like to put them over something else I am cooking so the fat drips over the other meat or dish. I've put these over baked beans and in this case I put it over the pork loin:
When I close the grill lid that rack moves forward a few inches and the fatty is right over the loin. I've also put them over ribs:

After a couple of hours the fatty and the loin are coming along nicely:
Here are the loin and the fatty resting:
And here we have the loin and fatty plated:
I have also done stuffed fatties. Fatties can be stuffed with anything, cheese, potatoes (someone just mentioned to me Tater Tots which sounds divine), peppers, proscuitto, fruit, veggies, pretty much anything that floats your boat.

For these two fatties I did one identical as above but I forgot the rub. But the other I decided to stuff and use bulk sausage rather than breakfast sausage. I bought a pound of bulk sausage and put it in a mixing bowl. I added minced garlic and onion as well as some black pepper and grated asiago cheese. Then I spread it out on a piece of wax paper and added a couple slices of prosciutto:
Then I added some chunks of blue cheese:
Then I rolled it back up and put it on the platter with the sweet fatty. The stuffed fatty is on the right:
I didn't think there was much difference between bulk sausage and breakfast sausage but the difference it pretty startling. Here are the two fatties resting (along with some baked beans):
The stuffed fatty is on the right again. Uncooked the breakfast fatty was much larger. When cooked it is much smaller and also much darker. The stuffed fatty looks like it is still raw compared to the other but it cooked through. Here are a couple shots of the stuffed fatty sliced:
When stuffing fatties with cheese you really have to pat the hell out of them as if you are pounding out hamburgers. You can't have the meat be loose and have cracks form as the meat firms up as the fat renders out. So, I'm telling you that spanking your sausage is required when stuffing fatties with cheese. I mean really give it a good beating. If not you may have some premature cheese leakage.

Here are two stuffed fatties I made for a buddy's bachelor party (along with ribs and beans). One I spanked harder than the other. Can you see which is which in the upper right?
Here is a close up of those fatties:
When the fatty on the left started oozing I threw a piece of foil under both of them to save the cheese.

Some recommend putting the fatty in the fridge for a while before cooking so that it is easier to manipulate on the grill. I really have not had a problem putting a warm fatty on the grill. As long as it is not touched for the first hour it will firm up enough to be moved without risk of it falling apart.

While I am not a proponent of drug use I am a big fan of smoking fatties so by all means everyone, go smoke some fatties!?!?!

Click here for the rest of the process