St. Crispy Bacon’s Day, or I Feel Sorry For Jews

Well, I haven’t posted in about 48 months, due to laziness, a breakup, a layoff, and laziness.  The good thing is that I have a lot of stored up pics and potential posts.  Too bad nobody reads this thing.  Maybe if I post more than once a year people will check it out.  I feel sorry for them if they don’t, because they’ll miss this one.  In the credit where credit is due dept, I saw this on another site sent to me by a friend.  They call it the Bacon Explosion, and it’s all the rage with the kids these days.  I call it the Bacon Log, or “Blog” for short (that’s a new word I just made up).  Anyway, I had to try it.  So I called a few guys I know who love bacon flavored anything and told them to come over one Saturday.  I’ve never tried to smoke anything on my little Aussie Bushman elite grill, but I figured it was worth a shot.  So I went to BBQ Galore and got a meat thermometer, some rub (Bad Byron’s Butt Rub), a smoker box (cast iron, small) and some hickory chips.  Oh, and a tin foil pan to catch drippins.

So I started off by soaking the wood chips in the pan.

Next I cooked up a batch of bacon (one package).  I like it crispy, so that’s how I made it.

After snacking that entire package of bacon and chasing it down with a box of salt, I made another one.  Then I chopped it up.

Next, I made the bacon weave.  If you had interrupted my Dungeons & Dragons game at age 13 to tell me I would someday master bacon weaving, I probably would have laughed about that for days.  I’m not sure what that means.

Hannibal Lecter would be proud.

By this time I have the grill on super low heat, the lowest it will go, and I put the drained hickory chips in the smoker box and put it on the grill off in the corner (I used the lower rack for the smoker box, and the top rack for the blog).  I had also bought a surface thermometer, and that went on the top rack.  The guy told me that the surface temp would be about 150 degrees hotter than the general climate temp inside the grill, so I was planning to use that as a gauge.  Next comes the sausage layer.  I used a mixture of hot and sweet Italian sausage.

Pigtastic.

Next I added the chopped up cooked bakey bits.  Then I seasoned it with the rub and some Italian dry seasoning I had.

A Porkaleidoscope.

Last came a drizzle of BBQ sauce.  I used a mix of Sweet Baby Ray’s Honey BBQ and Trader Joe’s, which has a little kick to it.

Now for the roll.  I carefully rolled the sausage forward…

Someday I will build a bacon fence that you can eat.

Then tucked in the ends and sealed the seam and carefully rolled it back.

I've washed my hands 13 times by now.

That's right.

Last, another coat of rub.

Then off to the grill.

I put a drip pan under it to catch the fat runoff.  Do NOT skip this step, as I’ve heard tell of bacon logs catching on fire from flaming fat fallout.

This pleases me to no end.

Ah, so clean.  Not for long…

And later…

Mmmmm...black pig sludge....

That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.

Next I let it rest for about ten minutes.  It was REALLY hard not to cut into it right away.  In the meantime I busied myself with brushing a good thick coat of BBQ sauce on that sumbitch.

How could this get any better?

Oh yeah, that's how.

Here it is being served.  Explicit content warning – the narrator works a bit blue toward the end of the video.  You’ve been warned.

And the finished product:

Do you see the steam? It was almost a sin to eat it. But not.

It took a little longer than normal, about 3 hours, because I kept checking it and letting all the heat out.  And the temp never got hot enough to produce any smoke whatsoever from the wood chips.  So it wasn’t really smoked at all.  But I have to say it was spectacular.  Being the cook, I went for seconds.  Only a few of us pigs got two pieces, and it was actually a mistake.  We could literally feel our sodium counts go up as the blood pressures rose and we started hearing each other’s heartbeats.  My buddy JT actually had to take a knee, and a couple of us hallucinated.  I wish I was kidding.  But it was the best thing ever.  You had to be there.  In fact, here’s a poem dedicated to those happy few who took on the challenge (my apologies to The Bard).