One of America’s Favorites – Bacon Explosion

July 12, 2021 at 6:02 AM | Posted in One of America's Favorites | Leave a comment
Tags: bacon, Bacon Explosion, baking, BBQ Sauce, Cooking, Food, Grilling, One of America's Favorites, Pork, recipes, Roasting, Sausage, Spices

A Bacon Explosion on a grill

A Bacon Explosion is a pork dish that consists of bacon wrapped around a filling of spiced sausage and crumbled bacon. The American-football-sized dish is then smoked or baked. It became known after being posted on the BBQ Addicts blog, and spread to the mainstream press with numerous stories discussing the dish. In time, the articles began to discuss the Internet “buzz” itself.

The Bacon Explosion is made of bacon, sausage, barbecue sauce, and barbecue seasoning or rub. The bacon is assembled in a weave to hold the sausage, sauce, and crumbled bacon. Once rolled, the Bacon Explosion is cooked (either smoked or baked), basted, cut, and served. The Bacon Explosion’s creators produced a cookbook featuring the recipes which ultimately won the 2010 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards for “Best Barbecue Book in the World”. The Bacon Explosion also won at the 2013 Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival.

Jason Day and Aaron Chronister posted the dish in December 2008 on their “BBQ Addicts” blog. It quickly became an Internet phenomenon, generating more than 500,000 hits and 16,000 links to the blog, and was even included on political blogs because “Republicans like meat.” There are fan clubs and follow-up videos of various attempts to create the dish.

The inventors are experienced barbecue competition participants from Kansas City, and compete in cook-offs as the Burnt Finger BBQ team. According to the Telegraph, “They came up with the delicacy after being challenged on Twitter to create the ultimate bacon recipe.” They christened their innovation the “Bacon Explosion: The BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The Bacon Explosion is similar to a number of previously published recipes. Day and Chronister do not claim to have invented the concept, but assert the term “Bacon Explosion” as a trademark.

Preparing a Bacon Explosion “requires the minimum of culinary talent” and the ingredient list is short. It is made from 2 pounds of thick cut bacon, 2 pounds of Italian sausage, one jar of barbecue sauce, and one jar of barbecue rub/seasoning. The Bacon Explosion is constructed by weaving the bacon together to serve as a base. The base is seasoned and followed by the layering of sausage meat and crumbled bacon. Barbecue sauce and more seasoning is added before rolling it into a giant “sausage-shaped monster” inside aluminum foil. It takes about an hour per inch of thickness to cook and is then basted with more barbecue sauce, sliced into rounds, and served.