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.

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How the GrillinFool celebrated the Super Bowl - Part III - Atomic Buffalo Turds

And finally we have the Atomic Buffalo Turds (ABT's). Don't let the name scare you. These things are incredible. A jalepeno stuffed with cream cheese a little smoky and wrapped with a half a slice of bacon. And for those of you that think this will be way to hot trust me they aren't as hot as it would seem. Certain things need to be done to minimize the heat. To see how to minimuze the heat click on the link below to see...


All you need for ABT's are peppers, little smokies, cream cheese and bacon as you can see below. I used two kinds of peppers. Standard Jalepeno's and whatever those little red ones were which I think were just baby red bell peppers.


The process is simple. Slice the peppers lengthwise leaving the stem which will make a great handle when they are cooked. Then scoop out the seeds and white flesh. I used a melon baller for this. If you want to make them hotter leave the white flesh and seeds. The white part and the seeds inside the jalepeno is where the year really comes from. If the outer part is cooked enough it won't pack much heat.

Once the peppers are halved and scooped spoon in a little cream cheese. I left the cream cheese out on the counter for about an hour to soften up and make this part of the process easier. Add a little smoky to each half pepper, wrap with a half slice of bacon and stick a toothpick into the bacon and the smoky to keep everything in place. Here is the process in the picture below from left to right:


Here is a platter full of ABT's that are ready to go on the grill:

These guys went onto the same grill that had the Bacon Explosion on it. They take about 45 minutes to smoke at around 250. The real timer though is the bacon. When it looks done the ABT's are done. The Fatty had been on about 2 hours at this point so I wanted to get my ABT's on right away. I put on half of them here. I added the other half about 20 minutes later:


Here we have the second batch. They have been on for about 20 minutes:


Here we have both the Bacon Explosion and the second batch of ABT's ready to come off the grill. I think I left these guys on about an hour while I socialized and played with my son:


And finally the ABT's on a plate and ready to eat. Be careful that cream cheese is like lava when they first come off the grill. While they cooled I got a couple of shots for this site:



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LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW!!! And let's grill some chicken!!

I have a fresh blanket of about 7 inches of snow on the ground outside. And when it snows the GrillinFool is grilling. Oh, sure we did the whole sledding thing with the baby boy. His first time on a sled. So here we have some gratuitous cute baby pictures. Here we have the future pitmaster in his snow gear just waiting to get in his sled:
He's all excited about the sled:


Ready to make his first descent:

I don't think he quite appreciates the simple joy of sledding just yet:


Now back to the grilling. This is probably one of the easiest meals one can make. Basically the recipe is chicken marinaded in garlic, shallots, Italian dressing and black pepper and then indirect for about 90 minutes. It's really that simple. I spent more time taking pictures than I did prepping the meal.


One does not have to use shallots but a shallot is perfect for this meal as not that much is needed. You could use onion but you will have a lot left over even with a small onion. So here we have an ear of garlic and a couple of shallots:


I wound up only using one of the shallots and the equivalent of about 5 cloves of garlic - 3 normal sized cloves and 4 smaller ones. Here we have the pealed garlic cloves:


I started chopping this garlic up when I realized I had something that would make the process so much quicker:


I don't want to spend the evening inside chopping garlic instead of enjoying the snow fall. That's when I remembered I had a coffee grinder in the cabinet that I never used it for anything but grinding up herbs and spices. It made quick work of the garlic:


Alas, this was the last voyage of the USS coffee/herb/garlic grinder. I barely got it to work as the lack of use over the years required me to slam down on the top of it to get it to spin. Looks like I need to both get a new grinder and actually use it more!!!

With the garlic chopped and no more grinder I had to chop the shallot by hand which you see here with the garlic, chicken and the rest of the ingredients:


I got what was called the best of the chicken. I had no idea that meant 3 legs, 3 thighs and 3 breasts. I've never seen chicken packaged like this. I really didn't need that much chicken this meal and didn't have the room for all of it so I put a leg, thigh and breast into another plastic bag with some of that amazing Pesto I talked about in the Lamb threads as you can see here:


The pesto chicken went into the freezer hence the label in permanent marker. This bag was going on the grill in 60 minutes:


To give you an idea of the grilling conditions I took a shot of the thermometer from inside:



And once outside I took some video as well of the conditions which was cold, snowy and windy:



Grabbed myself a beverage, in this case a Goose Island 312 Lager. Love this stuff:


Had a rough time getting the chimney started so I had to pretty much stand over it, add more paper 3 times and blow on it a lot to keep it going. So it took about 35 minutes to get the fire lit but I got it going

After about 60 minutes in the marinade I got the chicken out, salted it with coarse salt and then spooned over the chicken a little of the marinade concoction. The chicken is ready for the grill:


Here is the chicken on the grill:


Notice a few things in the above photo. First, two zone cooking. Coals on one side and chicken on the other for standard indirect grilling. Second, no piece of chicken is touching any other piece of chicken. If two pieces are touching they will insulate each other and increase cooking time for those two pieces. Also note the proximity of each cut of meat to the heat. The thighs are the closest to the heat despite the breasts being much bigger. The reason I do that is because the thighs have more fat in them and thus will not dry out as fast as the breasts. As for the breasts you will notice that the fatter part of the breast is closest to the heat. The skinnier part is farther away so that the skinny end doesn't dry out. Finally the legs are the farthest away and the fat part of the meat is closer to the heat than the other end. All of this will help the chicken cook evenly and be done all at the same time and look like this in about 90 minutes:


If you notice the two pics above that I did not move a single piece of chicken. I put the chicken on the grill and didn't move a single piece until I pulled the chicken off the grill. I never flipped a piece or repositioned it any way in order for it to cook more evenly. The beauty of laying the chicken out correctly in the first place and cooking indirect is that it makes this meal just that easy to make. I told you it was easy.

But let's back up a bit and look at what happened between the time I put the chicken on the grill and the above pic. First off, the first 30 minutes were rough. Couldn't get the temp up to 200. I had the lid set so the top vent was over the meat which drew the smoke from the chunk of apricot (big black chunk in the middle of the grill above the chicken) over the meat. When I switched it so the vent was over the coals it allowed more air to get to the coals and the heat jumped to about 280 which was just fine. And the smoke filled the the chamber anyway and gave some great smoke flavor to the chicken.

Had it been a typical summer evening I would've braised the chicken a couple times with the marinade but I didn't want to drop the temp down on the chicken anymore than what I did every time I opened the lid in 30 degree weather that was 8 degrees with windchill.

And of course there were more beverages to be had. I don't know how you chill your beer but I went with what nature offered me After a couple 312's I switched to a local product to save money and besides my taste buds were pretty much numb after a couple of beers anyway:


Ever seen a snow bagel?


Here we have the GrillinFool tending to the BBQ:


We also had some more sledding. Here is one of the casuaties of the sledding:


Here's an idea of how much snow we got:


If you look at the indentions in the snow in the pick above the snow below the indentions was how much snow we had at about 5:00 p.m. I took this pic about 2 hours later. And then you can see how much snow we had at 9:00 p.m.:


Here is my charcoal lighter at 5:00 and yes I go a little overboard in lighting my grill:


And here is that same lighter at 9:00 p.m.:


OK, enough of me reveling in the snow fall, back to the food. Another 20 minutes or so on the grill and here we have the chicken ready for to eat:


And along with my wife's whole wheat veggie pasta dinner is served:


Took an extra 20-30 minutes due to the weather but the chicken was fantastic. The legs and thighs were done and the breast was still juicy according to the wife.

10 minutes of prep time, 2 hours of cook time, a couple of beers, some sledding, and great chicken in the end...

Click here for the rest of the process