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

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